Tori Amos
To Venus And Back
(Atlantic)
Tori Amos does not do things the normal way. For most people, the way
to make fresh a concert, album, anything boringly mid-career, is to
go unplugged. Instead, for her fifth album, she's discovered the joys
of electricity.
A two-CD set, one half is a live album and like all such
self-indulgences it's mainly unremarkable. It does, however, with the
addition of a full band, act as a compass for her new direction.
Which mainly means trip-hop.
Inevitably, this can result in moribund clanking, but Amos' lyrics -
oblique, encrypted and arcane - are just about enough to make you
forgive her for following this tired old path. And when lyrical
content melds into jarring atmospherics - as on the psychotropic
loop of 'Datura', which uses shamanic ritual plants as a metaphor
for sex and divinity, or the eerily spectral and chillingly detached
'Juarez', the tale of hundreds of unsolved rapes and murders in a
Mexican border town - it can sound remarkably original.
Such scattered moments are not enough though. It's fine when she's
dabbling - the Madonna-style, morally ambiguous hymn to hollow LA
excess 'Glory Of The 80's' - but striking out in a totally new
direction is obviously too scary to contemplate for long, and the
lure of the trusty old joanna proves too strong. Consequently she
tinkles away on 'Josephine', retreading old ground in
ever-decreasing circles, while 'Lust' is a surprisingly weedy
canonisation of marriage.
As changes go, it hardly ranks alongside Bob Dylan aggravating
die-hard folkies by embracing electricity. But by getting herself
plugged in, Tori's managed to get more than a few wires crossed
along the way. 5/10
Jim Alexander
--
我是leila...
--
※ 發信站: 批踢踢實業坊(ptt.twbbs.org)
◆ From: T232-219.dialup.dj.net.tw