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Tori Amos: Under the Pink

While Tori Amos’ debut album, Little Earthquakes was very confessional, open and intimate, and as much as Under the Pink was described upon its release as a lateral move for her, it is certainly a step away into more conceptual songwriting. Under the Pink is indeed something of a concept album, that concept being personal, professional, and emotional relationships between women, across borders of age, culture, and belief.

Musically, it is a little more sedate and holding close to one style than anything she would do afterward, with only the Patti Smith-referencing “Space Dog” featuring a markedly different sound with the heavy and vicious guitar and bass, and also out of nowhere talk of dishcloths and grapefruit and lemon pie. However, it is not without excitement and not against exploding into moments of bombast when the emotion suits. “God” features a jumbled, scratchy guitar part and a funky bass line as Tori criticizes religious oppression of women. Trent Reznor, who was jokingly referenced on the previous album, duets with Tori on “Past the Mission” to nice effect. The electronic sounds that swoop and warble around “The Wrong Band” are weird and intriguing.

However, the center of everything is Tori at her piano, and her words. There is a lot of anger, passion, beauty, and humour. On “The Waitress” she screams ‘I believe in peace, bitch!’ as guitars swell, which is uh, strange, and not a little bit pointing the direction things were heading. Anger isn’t really the main emotion here, as Under the Pink is on the whole rather esoteric in theme. Her big hit, “Cornflake Girl” is about betrayal between women, using the offbeat metaphor of the ratio of cornflakes to raisins in cereal, and Tori has said that it was inspired by the practice of female castration. “Yes, Anastacia” about the Russian empress, is a suitably epic close at nine and a half minutes.

There was a time when Under the Pink made little impression on me, because of her nineties albums it has neither quite the powerful emotional punch of Little Earthquakes and from the choirgirl hotel, nor the wildly eclectic musicality of Boys for Pele or To Venus and Back, but it certainly shines brighter in the context of all that she’s released since 2000.

****

~ by jshopa on June 16, 2008.