consume

07. Tori hardly ever narrates anything without delving into it herself, and hearing her talking about an entire village’s worth of people in “Time” is a lot like the shifty feeling you get when you hear her so consumed with Leonard’s silly old Raincoat – that this is not quite the Tori that you know and love. However, what always becomes clear is that Tori is a superb narrator in the third person because she does not come across as some omnipotent watcher but as someone simply inside the situation like everyone she is singing about.

The first chorus of this soft piano ballad turns you around to let you know that it is in fact Time itself that Tori is narrating, and that the passage of it just happens to encompass the lives she is touching upon. There is a sleepy dreamy quality to this, one of the few appearances on this disc of Tori and her piano that is left wholly undressed. It has the same tone as “Merman” except that it reflects instead of apologizing; it has the hum of “Putting the Damage On” without the resentment.

Tori talking about boys and girls is so very different than Tom Waits doing the same thing; girls are her special children living in these interwoven communities where boys can be friends or just another enemy across the lines of a tiny cold war of cooties and kisses and things that they don’t even suspect will come into play.

“Time” is what those boys and girls don’t suspect… certainly not as their greatest enemy. Maybe they should be fighting it together instead of just tugging on pigtails and tattling on each other… but then they’d be trading in their wonder for reality, which would be doing Time’s own job for it. Better that we leave them as they are.

https://crushingkrisis.com/2001/09/5774244/

08. “Heart of Gold” is not lyrics or words but just this looping whining buzzing creation that circles and circles but gets nowhere but exactly where it began. Tori’s words are unintelligible until she is in the eye of this sonic storm with the thomping bass and edgy guitar circling her and tearing the roots of the drums up as they spin higher and higher. This is “She’s Your Cocaine” at zero-g… all of its elements coming loose from their moorings and floating upwards at once; nothing secure. The gender perspective in this one is lost and all that remains is Tori weaving in and out, almost puckishly mocking the search for a heart of gold … something that men quest for while women keep the fires tended. My question is this: are they searching for a golden heart in someone else’s chest, or one to put in their own? Either way, i don’t think she’s being very encouraging about it.

https://crushingkrisis.com/2001/09/5774200/

09. Girls are violent sometimes, and they don’t always mean to be. Waitresses in Tori’s world will kill to keep their tips, and blankettes are visicious clawed nymphs tearing at each other’s necks. The virtually unaccompanied warm electric piano here feels like a fuzzy blanket, and Tori obliges with soft vocals that are alternatingly clear and throaty with absolutely no support. This is another story like “Time” where she is not passing judgement on anyone, but just changing your perception of the characters within by narrating from the maternal position rather than the fraternal one.

This girl is Tori’s sister in crime, and she “was good as gold.” Suddenly we are reflected back to the last song and wondering if this means anything at all in light of Tori’s mockery of it. Could any girl as good as gold use such a simple excuse as “I Don’t Like Mondays” for her lashing out, or is it that any excuse is good enough for her? As it turns out, some of Tori’s girls are just as fallible as their male counterparts, and they will aim their golden guns wherever they might please regardless of where the blame should be assigned..

https://crushingkrisis.com/2001/09/5774195/

11. The bass growl and discordant piano at the beginning of “Raining Blood” betray it’s twilight zone peek at blue sky before it ever approaches the view itself. The piano sounds akin to the string roots of the dense “Bonnie & Clyde” backgrounds, and Tori is open-mouthed singing without ever really ending one word or beginning the next. The song comes off almost as a death march.

It is here that the concept of the album almost completely falls through… Tori’s perspective here is lost and you are stuck just hearing this as a song, and even that is a challenge. The piano slowly resolves into a more harmonic key, but the bass still menaces from the background as the song slowly becomes a parody of some sort of showtune musical lament… Tori mourning for her lost blue sky.

So, here we are again in Tori’s twilight world, and while she revels in it we are left wondering if there is even a point. This glance into her universe is so insular… so self-involved, that it is hard to do anything but be critical of it. At the same time, on other discs Tori rarely ever just gets her head down and plays, and this slow and deliberate take is entrancing as you let the reverby wailing carry you through.

It is these uncertain moments that unmake Strange Little Girls from a potential coherent success to a scattered narrative that shines through in bits and pieces. For every cohesive pairing of a song with voice and instrumentation – like the title track – there are these strange wandering moments that can be found in strange measures all over the album … Tori fighting to impose her narrative where there was none to begin with.

Sometimes it just isn’t there at all.

https://crushingkrisis.com/2001/09/5774163/