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Many thanks to Lucy
for this review!
Tori Amos
embarks on a muddled journey
Tori Amos lets her
eccentricities rule, and that's enough to turn some listeners off,
while seducing hard-core fans with a style that fuses the bubble-bath
sonics of Enya with the bombast of Led Zeppelin.
Her seventh album as
a solo artist, "Scarlet's Walk" (Epic), out Tuesday, slides
deeper into the mystic, her wordplay by turns strident, seductive and
incomprehensible, her piano-playing lush, lingering and practically
bereft of chords. The album is a loosely constructed journey across
America, where Amos' alter-ego, Scarlet, meets a discarded lap
dancer, prays on sacred Native American land and hangs with a Latino
revolutionary. It plays out as the latest series of scenes in Amos'
ongoing road movie, with Scarlet as a combination of Thelma and
Louise, coming to terms not justwith herself and her past but with
her country's sometimes troubling politics and traditions. If that
seems too muddled to possibly enjoy (and sometimes, frankly, it's
impossible to discern exactly what Amos is singing about), consider
the musicality of her wanderings. Amos' phrasing, both as a singer
and pianist, favors voluptuousness over sparseness, and when she's
on, the steam rises from songs like "Taxi Ride" and
"Pancake."
She layers her voice
into choirs, or converses with herself in whispers. Sometimes she
drifts too far into the New Age mystic ("Crazy"), but
"Scarlet's Walk" mostly sounds like the work of someone who
shuts out the mundane and tunes exclusively to her own idiosyncratic
frequency -- and that's something to celebrate in this era of
pre-fab, factory-approved pop personalities
By Greg Kot, Tribune
rock critic.
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