The Singles Jukebox

Our first time covering her, somehow…

[Video][Website]
[6.88]Alfred Soto: I haven’t paid attention to Amos since From The Choirgirl Hotel, and fans are lukewarm on the merits of her 2000s work, but if she sang as clearly and feelingly as she does here then I missed something. Her self-production is as uncluttered as modern space can be.
[7]

Edward Okulicz: First, the bad: Tori’s story/allegory/Montessori reads as clumsy and forced. Trouble is a girl! She has a friend and this friend is called Despair! And Satan is in there! It would not be unfair to say it’s a bit heavy-handed. But what is Tori without occasional heavy-handedness, and why not forgive that if the actual song sounds so damned light that the dark is being smuggled into your ears? The songwriting’s not back up to full flight, but the spooky, near-flamenco guitar line and piano is definitely the work of someone who’s recovered an understanding of what surroundings make her voice sound profound.
[6]

Brad Shoup: Amos is too smart to write some red-tinged bloozer around a tale of devils and dangers. There’s a real sense of unease here: something pinned to an actual location. You could stick this on the opening credits of a basic-cable TV drama. It’s that good!
[8]

Megan Harrington: Is this Tori’s Nashville audition tape? If not, can it be Rayna’s next single instead? I don’t have the personal bond so many of her fans do. This may indeed be a return to her peak period output, but I’m not invested in that narrative. I hear less of the mercurial work showcased on Under the Pink and more of T. Bone Burnett’s better writing for the pretend-Faith Hill works with pretend-Jack White to authenticate and rough up her sound storyline.
[7]

Mallory O’Donnell: Tori’s always been the Kanye West of white chicks: make all the tunes you want, just please stop singing on them.
[5]

Jer Fairall: Stark and elemental in its outline, as if being prepped for its own imaginary American Recordings cover, but Tori cannot help but subject it to her usual melodic knots and vocal trills, leaving its genre affectations in the dust it evokes.
[6]

Katherine St Asaph: Tori Amos’s strategy, given her brazen mess of a late career, seems to be “pretend nothing past Scarlet’s Walk ever happened except maybe “Fast Horse” — rejoin the safe road through AOR and country, where her career could’ve retired quite well. (Actually, that was probably the strategy as far back as when mums’ weepie “Maybe California” was Abnormally Attracted to Sin‘s lead single.) I hear all sorts of things here — some modern country women if they didn’t write for the Nashville machine and weren’t so concrete, or perhaps recent Laura Marling, though that might just be the Satan lyrics. But there’s more trademark Tori here than any of that: her sly humor (she calls herself a ginger, sung with a nudge); some of her prettiest moments in years (the panned, floaty “baby” is so good it happens three times); the startlingly timed eroticism, evocative like a suburban state highway whose streetlamps and windows just went dark; the gothic Southern feminism; the studied Americana (and little fermata when she gets North Carolina in there); how Mac Aladdin gets and resists the urge to butt in with the blues (and if anything past Scarlet’s Walk had happened, there’d be no resisting). I’m one of the few fans who likes her brazen mess of a late career, but subtlety has its rewards too.
[9]

Anthony Easton: I missed the old Tori — the Gnostic theology work, the theophillic feminism, phrases that seem deeply axiomatic at first listen. It reminds me of being queer and sensitive and working out all of those tensions in the mid ’90s. I was one of Tori’s girls, and no matter how much she spent the last decade isolating me, I yearn to return to the fold. This makes that possible.
[7]