if I’m wasting all your time this time maybe you never learned to take
Tori Amos, with her serpent familiar, sits muddied on the porch with her shotgun casually at the ready. Ghosts, emergency vehicles, a piano on fire. Beware. This is dangerous territory, this is Tori at her most aggressive and fragmented. Channeling Yma Sumac, Patti Smith, William Faulkner, and Joni Mitchell circa Hissing Lawns in heavily altered mindstates, laying waste to California and all it stands for. Sweet and tuneful is for pretty girls and ballerinas in saccharine musical boxes and it’s time for all that to burn, burn, burn. You ain’t man enough, friend.
On the other hand, Boys for Pele is nowhere near as forbidding as it looks or as many would have you believe. Beginning with a long silence before the soft build of “Horses” into a glittering and oddly twisting song. ‘Got me some horses to ride on.’ Then she rolls in the harpsichord for “Blood Roses” and that’s beautifully spooky, with the church bells and prayers of blood and her voice strained and raspy. ‘I’ve shaved every place where you’ve been,’ she sings and mouths a wordless sound of release. Yeah, don’t get comfortable. Tori’s voice is frequently hoarse, off-key, or dissonant on Boys for Pele and it keeps you unsteady. Not that there aren’t moments of the warm, perfect beauty that characterized her prior albums, they just tend to be a bit more textured and dark here. For instance, “Father Lucifer” is a perfect, tender piano ballad that has odd notes that sound clipped or wrong and some knotty guitar in the midsection. “Marianne” is just beautiful, poetic, and complex, and “Hey Jupiter” is swooningly damaged ambrosia.
Yet it’s when it gets its most outré that I love Boys for Pele best. The deliriously off-key and gothic “Professional Widow” scared off a lot of people, with its murky trip-hop beats and mean spidery harpsichord, and Tori reeling and howling ’starfucker just like my daddy’ but it’s their loss. All the fractured interstitial bits like the disconnected swing of “Mr. Zebra” are tantalizing snippets, open brackets seeking closure. The hit single, “Caught a Lite Sneeze” is heavy on the beats and cold metallic noise, with the harpsichord shuddering away in the background, paranoid in the midst of too much masculinity, and after that that sharp, direct sound of the piano opening “Muhammed My Friend” is like ice down the shirt, weird flashes of religion and roadside America (oh, Dew Drop Inn). “In the Springtime of His Voodoo” could burn your nation down. Cookies, rape hats, shotguns, comic strips, streetwalkers, Easter eggs, doughnut holes, napalm, classic movie stars, hot cars, and young males sacrificed to volcano gods, but expectations can go fuck themselves and the untrue can just watch their backs and cry to their mommies.
****1/2
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