CD - Tori Amos - American Doll Posse
Anyone who had the chance to see Tori Amos perform in 2005 would have been struck by her ten minute rendition The Beekeeper – bathed in orange light and smoke and the intense vibration of her organ she seemed to herald the arrival of the apocalypse. On her ninth studio album, Tori Amos has penned a 23-track soundtrack to the moral and political apocalypse breathing down the neck of the Western world.
The album is sung through five characters – the American Doll Posse – and in some ways it feels like Amos is using these personae to draw together the threads of earlier works. Fat Slut is forty abrasive seconds that echo the harshest edges of Boys for Pele, and the riff-heavy thumper Teenage Hustling might not have felt out of place on From The Choirgirl Hotel ; a sort of She’s Your Jack Daniels and Coke for the new century. The reappearance of strings on tracks like Girl Disappearing are a nice wink back to Under the Pink.
American Doll Posse features some of the heaviest, loudest material from Tori in years, and it’s nice to see this side of her come out again. With their guitar work and rough edged vocals, tracks like Code Red (“do this long enough you’ll get a taste for it”) and Dark Side of the Sun have a loud urgency reflective of these uncertain times, the soundtrack to an increasingly imminent and dark future. The multi-tracked vocals and insistent bass and drums of Body And Soul are crying out the remix treatment that might give Tori her second dance floor hit.
Sonically, the shifts in sound are one of the album’s biggest strengths. With guitars, drums, brass, and strings featuring, it seems really hard to pin the work down to a particular era, and this gives it a very contemporary feel. It’s very much an album of these times, with a sly undercurrent of humour that brings its lofty political goals down to a more personable level.
The more hardcore tracks are balanced with some of most delicate work Tori has ever written. Subtle electronic sounds provide a background for simple piano and guitar and the plaintive refrain ‘I feel there’s only so much time / because the you I know is fading away’ of Digital Ghost. The achingly gorgeous Roosterspur Bridge is possibly one of the standout tracks, and when Tori sings ‘sometimes I think understand / the fear in the boy the fire in the man’ the sentence encapsulates so much of the hope and despair that runs through American Doll Posse.
Tori Amos has built her loyal fan base from an abstract poetry that allows her listeners to see many facets of themselves in her songs – with American Doll Posse, she takes this into the political realm, and it’s a strength of the album that her metaphors are equally adept on matters personal and political.
Perhaps the sharpest moment on the record is Velvet Revolution where Tori envokes the 1989 upheavals in Europe over a nicely Eastern guitar and playful piano, almost cheekily pronouncing ‘the bomb of the season is a velvet revolution’. In the current conservative climate in America (and in Australia) statements like these cannot be read as anything other than incendiary. Much of Tori Amos’s material has encouraged her listeners to look inside themselves and find their own personal truths. On this album, she asks us to make that truth political.
In the Doll Posse’s America, the time has come to choose sides…
Tori Amos – American Doll Posse is in stores May 1.
Read our interview with Tori Amos here.
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