Read a review of Tori's April 10, 2005 concert in Hartford, CT from the April 12, 2005 ediiton of the Hartford Courant newspaper.
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Thanks to Cliff for sending me this review. You can read it online at ctnow.com or below. You can read all my review from the Hartford show here.
No Amos Song Really Obscure
By ERIC R. DANTON
Courant Rock Critic
The musician on stage Sunday night at the Bushnell summed up live performances with a simple statement: "When you have as many hits as I do, in a career this long, it's hard to please everyone."
Opening act Matt Nathanson said it in jest (none of his six albums has reached the charts), but he might as well have been describing headliner Tori Amos.
She hasn't dominated the airwaves, either, but Amos over the years has built a base of dedicated listeners who have a pretty clear idea what they want to hear from her. Fans of her B-sides and rarities lucked out Sunday, as Amos stayed away from many of her best-known songs in favor of more obscure material from her past few albums.
"Obscure" is a relative term among Amos devotees, though. Cheers and applause greeted the first notes of almost every tune the red-headed singer played, and she played a lot of music - about 20 songs during a show that lasted 1 hour, 45 minutes.
Much of her material came from Amos' latest album, "The Beekeeper," a metaphorically autobiographical record that seems to reflect a more mature, less dire version of Amos than some of her earlier work. It's those songs, though, that attracted a bevy of teenage listeners who found solace in Amos' unsettling imagery and dark emotion, delivered in a voice that ranges between low, fractured sensuality and a keening, almost brittle bite.
Although there were pockets of teens in the crowd, much of Amos' audience has grown up with her. Gone were the homemade fairy wings and diaphanous dresses that once made her audiences resemble a convention of dryads, replaced by less fantastical attire. And some of the newer songs, such as the near-lullaby "Ribbons Undone," resonated almost as much with the crowd as "Silent All These Years," an older tune that is one of the more lyrically devastating songs in the Amos canon.
She switched among piano, a pair of organs and a warbling Fender Rhodes, on which she played the ethereal "Strange." She straddled her bench on "Mrs. Jesus," playing piano with her left hand and adding an accompanying organ part with her right.
Amos also offered a pair of covers. A video screen on stage read "Tori's Piano Bar" as she played "The 59th Street Bridge Song (Feelin' Groovy)," a Simon & Garfunkel favorite, and a sprawling version of Kris Kristofferson's "Me and Bobby McGee."
She returned for two encores and ended the show with "Twinkle."
