Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

reviews

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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.

She rides rollercoasters but never screams.

“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.

https://crushingkrisis.com/2001/09/5774251/

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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. One day you will open your eyes and see her.

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/

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It's not glamorous...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… ...it's just business. 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/

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I Don't Like Mondays: She found the first body in a stairwell.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/

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10. There is a bass throb just slightly slower than the shallow breaths of “Precious Things” and a guitar that sounds more like one tinny note being rapidly pitch-shifted than anything being humanly manipulated. First we are reminded of just what a gun is… to America, and (forebodingly) to John Lennon.

The smell of cordite always makes her think of the fourth of july. As a child i was never sure of what i was supposed to think of “Happiness is a Warm Gun” … it seems to be directed at a woman, but it is about one at the same time. Is she happiness, or does she have her hands on the weapon? Tori deconstructs this Beatles classic as she moves through the composition… substituting her own chords and changes as she trips backwards and then forwards through the lyrics, and just as suddenly launching back into the McCartney/Lennon arrangement verbatim. Lennon’s nonsense suddenly turns into a too-personal carnal kind of knowlege of this girl, who is impossibly well-acquainted because she hardly misses a thing.

The rearrangement here is probably the strongest on the album, and if you can get past the narration by Tori’s father, the George Bushes, and the radio announcing Lennon’s death, you might be able to enjoy the song; it is “Datura”-like in length and scope, but immediately more coherent because Tori keeps herself separate from the background so that it can really just be scenery instead of pulling focus. And, as Tori departs from the script on keys and vocally the guitar starts quoting the White Album lick until she is back in the saddle. She doesn’t even approach the waltzing “i need a fix” bridge to the song until nearly the end, and in this order it makes more sense… although the fix could be a fix on guns or just a fix for the narrator. She draws this familiar piece out across the trancey backgrounds and solid beats from Chamberlain until she finally launches back into the “mother superior” phrases that eventually lead the song to its end.

So, if happiness is a warm gun, have we already fired?

https://crushingkrisis.com/2001/09/5774179/