Word: pinkness
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...gentle Nuala solely from his neck up, in thoughts and dreams and the occasional rounding of his lips. Drifting among blackouts, hallucinations and long days of morphine-muted delirium, he stitches together a history for Nuala as an archetypal carefree country girl, all windblown red hair and stylized pink cheeks. But since Blatchley is also an intellectual (his police beat was forged and stolen art), he isn't satisfied with his first-draft images. As he revises and colors them in, he achieves a union with Nuala that, against all odds, isn't totally one-sided. The result...
However, the release of Amos' fourth album, from the choirgirl hotel, may have been greeted with some hesitation by many fans. Under the Pink, her sophomore album, rang with much of the same poignant energy that shot Little Earthquakes into stardom, but carried less fire and more contemplation. Amos' last album, Boys for Pele, took a completely different turn from the path so unabashedly carved out by her two previous release. Fraught with musical experimentation on Amos' new harpsichord and lyrics so bizarre that they must have been in code, "Pele" may have impressed avant-garde musical connoisseurs but left...
...once again in "iieee," giving the album a disappointing aura of deja vu before it is even halfway listened to. "Black Dove (January)," the first of the album's quiet numbers, bears short chorus that immediately brings to mind the song "Past the Mission" from Under the Pink...
While "choirgirl hotel" ends with a disappointingly mediocre song called "Pandora's Aquarium"--a feat echoing Pink's conclusion with the epic but lifeless "Yes Anastasia"--the final stages of this album remain fascinating. "Hotel" (the song, not the album itself) changes quite suddenly into a hypnotic pseudo-techno piece, shifting the mood of the song from painfully emotional to pure recklessness. Although "Playboy Mommy" may resemble a lazy folk songs more than a pop number, it fits nicely as the next-to-last song on the album, winding down contentedly from Amos'veritable smorgasbord of musical moods...
...points though, one might wonder where the emotional supernovas are in from the choirgirl hotel. Boys for Pele had the mesmerizing "Caught a Lite Sneeze;" Under the Pink contained the scandalous "God;" and of course, Little Earthquakes remains a virtual apocalypse of emotion, despite the recent trends of radio stations to overplay "Silent All These Years." Is Tori Amos finally starting to make peace with the demons that drove her to create painfully honest pieces such as Earthquake's "Me and a Gun," which was based on her experience with rape? If she is, are her musical talents strong enough...