REVIEW: Tori Amos, To Venus and Back (Atlantic)
- Chelsea Spear
The press kit that accompanies Tori Amos's latest creative venture comes complete with a pile of clippings about a quarter of an inch thick that detail the singer's recent relationship with MP3.com on her recent tour with Alanis Morrisette. After listening to To Venus and Back, this partnership should come as no surprise.
_TV&B_ further chronicles Amos's search for the ghost in the machine. Her last album, 1998's from the choirgirl hotel, found the singer exploring electronic textures and wedding techno non-structure to her take on classic songwriting, bringing a heart and a soul to this kind of music not often found elsewhere. On TV&B, Amos occasionally leaves her piano aside to write songs that seem exclusively written on electronic instruments, such as the piquant, trebly "Datura" and the haunting "Juarez," which dopplers to a beat that sounds like wind moving over the desert. In other places, such as the noirish opening track "Bliss," she brings her piano to a place where a heartbeat sounds like an electronic drum. The overall effect suggests an album recorded by the Lady in the Radiator from the movie Eraserhead, as produced by Tom Waits circa Bone Machine.
Of course, unlike the Lady in the Radiator (often interpreted by Lynch scholars as the voice of suicide), Tori can come off like an agent of hope, or at least a desire to understand. The lyrics on this album deal with women and their relationships with those around them - "Bliss" suggests someone trying to extract herself from a stifling parental relationship, "Juarez" deals with a heinous rape/murder in Mexico, and the rapturous, decadent snare drum and tinkly melodies of "Josephine" suggests Jeanette Winterson, a reinvention of the Napoleonic War from the General's girlfriend. With Tori, though, it's best to leave lyrical interpretations to the intuitive mind; after all, logic might balk at lines such as the opening gambit, "Father I killed my monkey."
The second disc in this set features Amos's first official live album. While one live set will do little to stop up the seemingly endless flow of bootlegs the chanteuse's fans demand, it serves its purpose to portray the intensity, beauty, and wry humour of Amos's live shows. Hearing her live performance in such a well-produced, high-quality context is a revelation in and of itself, and the set list both reflects crowd favourites (such as a new version of "Cornflake Girl," with a bluesy introduction) and rare beauties like "Cooling" and "Purple People." Fans of Amos will doubtlessly already own this, but new converts and the curious would do well to check this out, if only for the considerable joys of this unusual and delightful live set.
