When Swiveling That Hip Doesn’t Do The Trick

Thanks to Chris’s post about Tori Amos’s new best-of/compilation over on Do You Feel Loved?, I’ve been going back through my old Tori Amos records, basically checking to see how they hold up after I haven’t listened to them for at least a year and a half.

Tori Amos “In The Springtime Of His Voodoo” – This is my favorite track off of Boys For Pele, which I think is by far her finest record. It’s Amos at her weirdest, and at the peak of her powers as a songwriter. The songs from the first two albums may mean more to the type of fans who do so much to make Tori Amos something most sane people would like to keep a distance from, but Pele is where the real creativity and craft are let loose full force. If we’re comparing her to other piano-playing pop stars, I’d say it’s her Goodbye Yellow Brick Road. It’s this defining burst of creativity that is experimental in style and masterful in substance, and slightly overwhelming too because there’s just so much of it. The unfortunate thing is while Goodbye Yellow Brick Road is widely regarded as Elton’s masterpiece, Boys For Pele is usually just cast off as being Tori’s “weird” long album.

“In The Springtime Of His Voodoo,” like a lot of the best songs from the album, sounds as though she is channeling Led Zeppelin. She nails the lusty vocals, the clever song structures, the heavy blues and folk influences. If you transpose the piano lines from “…Voodoo,” “Professional Widow,” “Little Amsterdam,” and “Blood Roses” to heavy metal guitar, you’ll find that you get something nearly as great as anything off of Houses Of The Holy or Physical Graffiti. Though I could do without the smugness of the “honey, we’re recovering Christians” line, I’ll adore that opening bit where she sets the scene before realizing that “I’m quite sure I’m in the wrong song…” forever.

Tori Amos “She’s Your Cocaine” – If we’re judging Amos’s career as it stands right now, it would seem that From The Choir Girl Hotel is the end of her run of great records. (I’m not such a big fan of her first two records, Little Earthquakes and Under The Pink, but I’ll definitely concede their status as classics.) It’s something of a logical conclusion following Boys For Pele, since it continues with her experimentation with arrangement and writing songs on something other than a piano. Too much of the album already sounds a little dated to me – the treatments on the guitars and drums in particular scream “late 90s alt-rock/trip hop,” and I can’t help but wonder how this will sound much later on when it may seem more quaint and old-fashioned rather than five-minutes-ago. It’s not that bad, it could be a lot worse, but whenever I hear post-Pele Amos, I’m almost always fixated on the production and engineering since most of her last three records are somewhat lacking in solid tunes and sound very same-y to me.

“She’s Your Cocaine” is the Tori Amos version of a stomping glam number, right down to the lyrics about gender-bending. This sort of thing is usually rote and tedious when other folks try it, but since Tori is basically bat-shit insane, most obvious influences get filtered through her mind and end up coming out sounding sort of strange and reconfigured (see: above paragraph referring to Led Zeppelin), which is exactly what I think a good artist should do with their influences. As with “…Voodoo,” there’s one great amusing lyric in this one – “I”m writing good checks / you sign “Prince Of Darkness” / try “Squire Of Dimness” / please don’t help me with this!”