06. By the middle of the disc you are starting to realize the difference between a man talking to a woman and a woman talking to herself. “Rattlesnakes” turns Tori into some sort of alternative country star every time she launches into the chorus, but we keep coming back to guns and snakes and that never born child that still haunts her. Did this strange little one somehow escape that emotional black hole of from the choirgirl hotel where its emotions might have originated? The man in charge mocks her by saying “all she needs is therapy, all you need is love is all you need” but Tori turns it inside out to expose the fallacy of the statement – therapy and love will not even begin to crack the surface.

“Rattlesnakes” is “Black Dove” through a funhouse mirror… wielding a gun to protect herself from the snakes that are her kin. Does Tori realize the paradox that she’s set up here, with her heroine shooting down the writhing worries that she herself has created? Snakes and guns hold too much meaning already in this Tori universe to keep your brain quiet as she intones them again and again over more humming keys, and then she’s gone just as quick as you were confused.