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Many thanks to Lucy
for this review!
Tori Amos
Scarlet's Walk
AFTER last year's
sporadically brilliant cd of cover versions, Strange Little Girls,
Tori Amos has reverted to her own pen for this sprawling
"concept" album. The result is a triumph of quantity over
quality: at 18 songs over 70-plus minutes, it would have benefited
from pruning. Though this might have compromised the integrity of her
"theme", which concerns a coast-to-coast journey of
discovery undertaken by the Scarlet of the title, it would have made
for a more listenable and approachable album. Many of the tracks on
this kook's tour of America drift by in a haze of sameness:
mid-tempo, plangent, melancholy. Whereas Amos has hitherto been
famous for the peaks of ecstasy to which her music can ascend, and
for the churning, visceral depths to which it can plunge, here she
seems content to cruise along in the middle lane, only occasionally
putting her foot down (Don't Make Me Come to Vegas and Taxi Ride are
particularly spine-tingling). This is not a bad album; it contains a
wealth of truly lovely music. But its moments of greatness are simply
too few.
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