News: Wears The Trousers Reviews A Piano

Alex Ramon reviewed A Piano for Wears The Trousers, a new online magazine that focuses on women in music.

Tori Amos
A Piano: The Collection
Rhino

piano forte

The release of this monumental compilation just three
years after Tales Of A Librarian suggests that the
latter ‘best of’ did not entirely satisfy Amos’s desire
for a comprehensive retrospective of her career. It’s
hardly surprising; having produced a series of stunning,
epic records which have each rehabilitated and trans-
formed the notion of the concept album, Amos must
surely feel a certain amount of frustration that her
extraordinary music is still frequently dismissed by
much of the mainstream British music press as the
work of a Kate Bush clone. By now, of course, such
accusations just sound plain silly: could an artist really
sustain nine albums and a succession of Odysseyan
tours (not to mention survive a major record company
scrap) by simply ‘copying’ another one? Hardly.

Nonetheless, the persistence of these kinds of comments
points to a worrying critical tendency to dismiss certain
female artists on entirely superficial grounds of similarity.
While identikit male guitar bands and warbling R&B wan-
nabes merrily rip each other off without comment or
censure, some critics’ indignant response to Amos’s
work — “We’ve already got one like that!” — sadly
reflects a refusal to engage with another complex,
uncompromising (and resolutely female) artistic vision.
Such a reaction seems both glaringly unfair as well as
inaccurate. After all, surface similarities notwithstanding,
Bush and Amos have never been all that alike in perform-
ance style, lyrical content or career philosophy; it’s
about as easy to envisage Bush embarking on a 200-
date tour as it is to imagine Amos writing a rhapsodic
ode to light and birdsong and getting Rolf Harris to sing
on it. Fortunately, Amos’s heartening response to such
blinkered critical diminishment has been to keep her focus
firmly placed upon her music, as vividly demonstrated by
A Piano, a beautifully packaged collection that fully
confirms her singular status. This boxset — which, in
a stroke of design genius, is shaped to resemble the
keyboard of one of Amos’s treasured Bösendorfers —
contains five discs and 86 tracks but still only manages
to scratch the surface of her brilliant career.

That said, even the most ardent of Toriphiles may
approach this release with a mixture of delight and
trepidation. Since Amos’s records are so intricately
worked out, so thematically cohesive, do we really
want another collection that inevitably distorts their
immaculate sequencing and, by so doing, risks muddying
our memories of the original albums? The fact is that a
collection such as this one can never hope to please all
of the people all of the time, and once you’ve recovered
from the shock of some truly questionable omissions (no
Northern Lad! no Talula! no Scarlet’s Walk, fer chrissake!)
and the not overly generous supply of new and rare
material (just seven previously-unreleased tracks in all,
along with some alternate mixes, demos and a healthy
assortment of B-sides), it’s time to relax and savour what
is here, as well as the fact that Amos has been able to
produce the collection and oversee the selection process
herself. In her own words: “A lot of times you’re a grand-
mother when you get that opportunity to do the boxset
— or you’re dead. To be current and creating, alongside
putting a retrospective together, is an opportunity that
you don’t always have in life.” For Amos, this collection
marks “the end of an era” and it testifies to both the
stylistic diversity of her output and the consistency of
its quality. If her music is intricately bound up in your
existence and identity then the experience of listening
to A Piano is rather like flicking through a book of your
own life, and discovering that, while a few crucial
chapters have gone missing, they’ve been replaced by
others that you’d forgotten about and a few that you
didn’t know were there.

It will come as no surprise that no inclusions from Amos’s
ill-starred Y Kant Tori Read days are made; instead,
the first four discs trace a broadly chronological path
through her post-1990 career, taking in everything from
the bare-bones intimacy of Little Earthquakes (1992),
the dynamic rock of from the choirgirl hotel (1998),
the swirling electronica of To Venus & Back (1999)
and the widescreen panoramas of the mighty Scarlet’s
Walk (2002). Disc A is something of a settling of scores,
presenting an extended and rearranged version of Little
Earthquakes that more accurately reflects Amos’s
original vision of the album. It’s a bold (and possibly
foolhardy) move to re-order a record that, for most of
us, was perfect in its original incarnation, and no doubt
many admirers of the album will feel a certain amount of
ambivalence about Amos’s decision to do this. Happily,
the re-sequencing does not interfere with the impact
of the album, which still sounds incredibly powerful,
retaining its ability to chill, inspire, shock and console
in equal measure. And it’s unquestionably a bonus to
have the likes of Upside Down, Flying Dutchman, Take
To The Sky and Sweet Dreams collected together in
one place on this disc.

Discs B-D mix tracks from Under The Pink (1994), Boys
For Pele (1996), choirgirl, Venus, Scarlet and The
Beekeeper (2005) with pit stops for the rare and
unreleased material, while Disc E collates a selection
of her B-sides and demos. (A typically well-produced
booklet offers photos, background detail and commen-
taries on many of the inclusions.) As on Tales Of A
Librarian, some of the album tracks have been subtly
(and in some cases, very subtly) remixed from the
original versions; in Amos’s terms, these are acts of
“refurbishment” designed to prevent her earlier work
from sounding dated. The most noticeable tweaking
occurs on the dense choirgirl tracks: violent guitar
stabs and all manner of unidentifiable sinister noises
add new layers of atmosphere to Cruel and iieee, while
the Kurzweil and sighing pedal steel on Playboy Mommy
are given extra space. All the remixes are effective,
however, contributing a crisper and cleaner sound to
the songs.

If last year’s Official Bootleg series demonstrated Amos’s
ability to command an audience with ‘just’ her voice and
exquisite keyboard skills, these discs remind of her equally
dextrous control of studio toys and band dynamics, not
to mention the evolution of her singing and the complex
beauty of her songwriting. As her frames of reference
have broadened, taking her music ever deeper into
history (or herstory), politics, myth and legend, Amos
has learned how to utilise a select group of musicians
— principally, drummer Matt Chamberlain and bassist Jon
Evans — who share her sense of studio meticulousness.
The opportunity that this boxset offers to trace her
creative arc is genuinely thrilling, and it may surprise
some listeners that the noisiest, rockiest songs here
are among the most piercingly effective. But the
constant component of her work is, of course, the
piano, and these discs attest to her consistent and
creative reinvention of that instrument as a vital and
versatile part of the pop-rock idiom.

There’s always something new to uncover in Amos’s
songs and each listener will of course have their own
favourite (re-)discoveries as they dive into this collection.
But it’s the new material that most fans will make a bee-
line for first, and the previously unreleased tracks are as
brilliant as anything she’s ever done. The tense Take Me
With You (which Amos began in 1990 and finally comple-
ted this year) is an immediate highlight, a seamless
merging of her earliest and most recent sensibilities.
Walk To Dublin (Sucker Reprise) is a captivating slice
of harpsichord-driven Pele-era madness, while the
Beekeeper reject Not David Bowie rocks and rumbles
with a blistering mix of Hammond organ and clavinet
that has to be heard to be believed. Meanwhile, Marys
Of The Sea gets supplemented by a cheeky Intro Jam
which finds Amos scatting and improvising over funky
piano, bass and drums. “I’ve got to face some kind of
evil tomorrow,” she sings, rather cheerfully. Elsewhere,
Ode To My Clothes manages to be both playful and
desolate and Dolphin Song is simply mesmerising.

Each of these tracks demonstrates her amazing ability
to take a song through diverse emotions, metres and
moods. With her richly expressive vocals, Amos can turn
a tender ballad of love betrayed savage with a simple
shift in intonation or a casually dropped profanity —
listen to the eruption of anger that spills into the bridge
of Take Me With You or the sudden Southern twist she
puts on the “daughter of a preacher man” lyric in Dolphin
Song. Her vocalisations are peerless in their expressive-
ness and unpredictability. Meanwhile, intricate temporal
shifts in the music are matched and enhanced by startling
lyrical juxtapositions: Sister Janet finds her “slipping the
blade in the marmalade”; Beulah Land has her requesting
“religion, and a lobotomy”; on Honey she’s trying to
“bribe the undertaker” and confronting a man who only
“liked [his] babies tight.” (Listening to these lyrics you
may find yourself wondering whether it can be a mere
coincidence that Amos was born in the year Sylvia
Plath died.)

From moment to moment, you never know in what
direction her songs are going to take you: the nine-
minute Zero Point spends a few seconds masquerading
as a delicate piano ballad before mutating into an epic
of programmed beats and distorted guitar. Elsewhere,
vaudeville touches merge with classical flourishes,
furious harpsichord joins with church bells. As she put
it so memorably in her semi-autobiography Piece By
Piece: “Some days life can feel pretty normal…then
there are other days that make you think you’ve
walked into something sinister, like a Hermann Hesse
novel.” Her songs contain and convey that breadth of
feeling and experience, allowing the sacred and profane,
the oblique and the brutally direct, the mythic and the
colloquial, to occupy the same breathing space. Few
musicians have the capacity to channel such calm and
frenzy, either live or on record. And even fewer can
match her ability to combine intellectual rigorousness
with visceral emotion. But, for all her intensity, A Piano
exposes an incredible amount of humour in her work,
black and otherwise.

Still, it’s a genuine shame that none of her brilliant
covers are featured, no Smells Like Teen Spirit or Angie,
and nothing from her bracingly subversive (and criminally
underrated) Strange Little Girls album — who wouldn’t
kill to hear her rendition of Public Enemy’s Fear Of A
Black Planet? Anything, in fact, would be preferable to
the Armand van Helden dance remix of Professional
Widow, which, as on Tales…, sounds like a garish
intrusion here. However, its appearance is compensated
for by the inclusion of a blood-curdlingly intense live
version of the song elsewhere. Moreover, the B-side
disc yields a spectacular sequence of songs, including
an inspired deconstruction of Home On The Range
(which clearly anticipates Scarlet’s Walk’s investigation
of Native American history), the most poignant version
of This Old Man you’re ever likely to hear and the rare
Merman, one of her most haunting compositions. The
demo medley is also a wonderful addition that bravely
showcases works in progress; it’s fascinating to hear
the complex narrative of A Sorta Fairytale being devel-
oped, while on Playboy Mommy she truly sounds as
if she’s in the process of channelling the song from
another dimension.

As with all of Amos’s work, thought, care and an almost
visionary quality of attention to detail have gone into
the compilation of A Piano. This remarkable collection
confirms her genius, contextualising an extensive body
of work that, spiritually speaking, owes as much to The
Beatles, Led Zeppelin or Nirvana as Kate Bush and yet
retains its utter uniqueness. Along with last year’s
Official Bootleg series, the autobiography and this
year’s Fade To Red video collection, A Piano offers
another opportunity to explore the depths in Amos’s
music as we await the next step on her journey (a
new studio album is due next spring). It’s a pricey
purchase, to be sure, but think of it as a spiritual
investment…you’ll be listening to these songs forever.

~ Alex Ramon