Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

Tori Amos

by

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/

by

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/

by

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.Actually the gestapo picked her up.

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/

by

All of these things are true.12. “Real Men” is strangely propulsive, with each piano upswing leading to a tiny crescendo and another downturn, the inverse of the preceding song. Coming from a man this lament for real men would seem self-assured and chiding, but Tori reducing this collection of girls back down to their boyish opponents makes her point better than anything else in the arsenal. She invokes her warring sexes again here, pointing out that this is truly a cold war… with no real casualties but with deep rooted scars that even her friend Time might not heal. Her narration of trading uniforms and places seamlessly ties together her concept of borrowing these pieces from their fathers… girls can play along, and sometimes they can find out what a real man could be to them along the way.

Of course, they are just girls still, young and awkward in all the wrong places, but here they have all opened up these strange spaces in their father’s works where they had left something out, or where they had assumed too much about the girls that they were speaking on the behalf of.

https://crushingkrisis.com/2001/09/5774142/

by

If you let go of Tori’s concept and free-fall through Strange Little Girls it is bound to disappoint; aside from the mellow tone and the lack of organic piano this album is different than Tori’s normal work because she is so far removed from her subjects instead of being a part of them. “Strange Little Girl” is the appropriate entry-way because it is the most like her own work… told in third person but obviously implicating herself over the course of the song. The farther away from that mold you venture on this disc the more tenuous the connection to Tori becomes, until some of the songs are just out and out covers.

Ultimately i can’t help but think of this disc as a failure, because it doesn’t work as a record and doesn’t really do what Tori claims she had intended. However, there are places that Tori has taken these adopted girls of hers that they had never been before… places that expose the fallacy and security of the men who originally narrated them. None of these versions wholly precludes their original, but all of them follow the rule of covers: don’t touch a song unless you want to add your own voice. In this respect Tori was unfaltering, and i suppose the only thing i could blame her for is that the voice she added was not entire the one i had been expecting.

https://crushingkrisis.com/2001/09/5774101/