Tori Amos

05. Tiny electronic drum taps are backed up with a cymbal sounding so warm that i imagine it heated and sizzling to create the tiny static that follows. Some inverse version of the loop from Fiona’s “Sleep To Dream” plays itself out here, daring you to dream if you want any rest at all. And, just as you are lulled into a false sense of security in rhythm and in the simplicity of this song you are surrounded by this inescapable melody carrying itself through the sizzling and sinister noises of the backdrop it is set against.

The sonic landscape is polar and unforgiving, and she has no intentions of falling in love again; in the past the lyrics to this sounded like the kind of lie a man tells because he can. Suddenly, you can feel the utter barren waste of an empty heart and you know all at once that he is not lying when he says “I’m Not In Love” and that she does not care. The song is just the empty space between them, or maybe the picture that is hiding “the nasty stain still hiding there” : the blood red of a tiny patch of heart that is left. The lyrics repeat endlessly and hearts skip beats just like records… Tori lets out all of her breath at the end and we are left in the chilling landscape again, with only the slow warm drench of the cymbal to root us back to anything physical. And then the record stops.

https://crushingkrisis.com/2001/09/5774259/

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.

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

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/