There is a review of Tales Of A Librarian in the January 2004 issue (#23) of Blender Magazine (With Britney Spears on the cover).

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Thanks to Josh and Natasha for letting me know about this album review and sending me scans of the photo printed with the review. You can read the review and see the photo below:


FAMOUS AMOS
Redhead Steinway prodigy offers the best of her complex CDs

Tori Amos
"Tales of A Librarian"
**** (4 stars)

From farm-moored artrockers to Barry Manilow's Kmart Chopin, scores of performers have tried to make classical piano music truly pop. But only North Carolina-born Tori Amos has done it consistently well. With lightening speed and lake-water tone, the English emigre sings soprano lines as Kate Bush did in the '80s. Yet fragility is not Amos's default demeanor.

She takes fierce positions, yet she never forgets the killer arpeggio or riff. She can be outrageous. But writhing around on her piano stool, she's also commenting on the the viability of an instrument that, in rock terms, mostly reads "Not Guitar." Amos is musical and lawyerly, racy and warm, literary and draft. She is, in the form of a piano whiz-turned-singer-songwriter, the women from Sex and the City - all four of them. Where other female performers extend the legacies of Chrissie Hynde or Stevie Nicks or Madonna, Amos creates her own.

Ten years after she debuted talking of religion and sex and fairies, her emotion-driven fusions of romantic-era structure and sound linked to the form, spirit and expansiveness of the '70s-sired rock remain peerless.

As an anthology of Amos's most tuneful material, this set cannot satisfy as do her best albums - 1992's Little Earthquakes and its searing follow-up, Under the Pink, and the 1998 rock extravaganza From the Choirgirl Hotel. From her first few years, you get beauty as uncut as "Winter," neo-R&B as polished as "God," eccentricity as catchy as "Professional Widow." With "Cornflake Girl," you get kitchen-sink memories expressed in walktzing, surreal terms; after Amos adds fuller, rock-geared arrangements, you get "Jackie's Strength," with the ecstatic invocation of Jacqueline Onassis as a woman who could have wilted or flourished but did the latter.

You also get, in "Snow Cherries from France," one of two previously unreleased songs, leisurely folk-rock imbued with sharp, fleet turns. What you don't get are the surroundings. And with Amos, the long form is no less expendable than it is with Led Zeppelin. (James Hunter)