Tori Amos' strange cornflake travelogue

Yes, testosterone-driven heavy metal and angst-ridden alt-rock rule. Jane’s Addiction, Soundgarden, Radiohead, Led Zeppelin, Dream Theater and Rush sound both bleak and transcendent at the same time. Great music for those of us who belong to "generation hexed. " But there are days when we’re not in the mood for cock-rock-around-the-clock. Sometimes when it’s drizzly, depressing and endlessly gray outside, the best thing to do is to listen to CDs from delicate dreamers like Kate Bush, Rickee Lee Jones, the Cowboy Junkies, the Indigo Girls, Edie Brickel and the New Bohemians and Joni Mitchell, and drift.

Have you ever tried listening to Mitchell’s A Case of You, Brickel’s Circle or the Indigo Girl’s Ghost after breakups, before near breakdowns or during breakfasts in a strange girl’s house? Amazing the stuff that Joni, Emily Saliers (with associate Amy Ray) and Edie wrote. I can drink a case of you/Still I’d be on my feet, I would still be on my feet. Everything is temporary anyway/When the streets are wet, the colors slip into the sky/That means you and I are... And there’s not enough room for this world for my pain/Signals cross and love gets lost and time passed makes it plain/Of all my demon spirits I need you the most/I’m in love with your ghost...

On the other side of the gender fence only Paul McCartney or Jeff Buckley or Dave Matthews or Morrissey could write ballads as lilting as those.

Most female singer-songwriters these days put too much importance on appearing chic on MTV rather than coming up with sincere songs. (Acts like Sheryl Crow, Jewel, Shakira, Pink, Michelle Branch and her army of clones.) There are exceptions, though — Alanis Morissette, PJ Harvey, Natalie Merchant and Tori Amos.

Years ago, I borrowed a couple of Tori tapes from my classmate in UST — "Little Earthquakes" and "Under the Pink." I held on to them for a year, I think. During Dr. Tanlayco’s Fiction class, my classmate Abigail would nag me to return ‘em. A dozen "tomorrows" later, I gave the tapes up. Reluctantly. With a heavy heart. They were that good, especially Amos’ debut album. If Bob Dylan defines a poem as a naked person, Tori’s songs in "Little Earthquakes" are freaky exhibitionists.

In Silent All Those Years, you’d get the impression of a violated angel singing about being boxed in. (It does sound a bit like Led Zeppelin’s Going to California, but what the heck! Tori has voice of a mermaid in jeans.) Me and a Gun is as stark as stark can get: Here, Tori sings — unaccompanied, without the frills of keys, horns or strings — about being raped at gunpoint. Which really happened to a young Amos. Quite unsettling, indeed. And even if China had lyrics in Mandarin it would still sound terribly, terribly poignant.

The reviews (particularly in Rolling Stone) were glowing. Except for one writer who said that Amos is a "pop charlatan riding on the new age bandwagon." Well, if a brilliant songwriter like Tori Amos is considered a "poser," I’d gladly call myself "this poser," dye my hair purple, play careening piano and write, "This poser blah blah blah." (Bato, bato sa langit...)

Critics be damned: Tori’s music on "Little Earthquakes" was like a whiff of angel’s breath to the asphyxiating rock scene when it came out. In "Under the Pink," Toni put more distorted guitar to the mix. (I just love the reggae ramble on Past the Mission) and never let up on writing subversive lyrics. In God, she sings, "God, sometimes you just don’t come true/Do you need a woman to look after you?"

I didn’t like "Boys for Pele," famous for that pig-suckling photo, and the succeeding Tori albums. But I couldn’t resist her collection of covers released last year called "Strange Little Girls."

The singer had done strange covers before — Billie Holiday’s Strangefruit, the Rolling Stone’s Wild Horses and Nirvana’s Smells Like Teen Spirit; Kurt and Co. even entered the stage at the start of their gigs, pirouetting as Tori on tape sang, "Now welcome gods bring me friends as father loves me to pretend." But none more offbeat than the covers on last year’s "Strange Little Girls." Lou Reed’s New Age, Depeche Mode’s Enjoy the Silence, 10cc’s I’m Not In Love, The Stranglers’ Strange Little Girl, Tom Wait’s Time, the Beatles’ Happiness is a Warm Gun, even Slayer’s Raining Blood and Eminem’s ‘97 Bonnie & Clyde are all given the patented Tori treatment. Yes, Neil Young may have written Heart of Gold but after Tori was through with it, turning it into a "Rust Never Sleeps" meets "Ladies of the Canyon" overdriven romp, the song doesn’t belong to Young anymore. And Slayer?

(Sidenote: On the CD sleeve, there is a photo of a persona representing each of the songs, plus a cryptic line. For the I Don’t Like Mondays girl, there is Tori in a highway patrol uniform with a line saying, "She found her first body in a stairwell." Hey, we’re still waiting for Neil Gaiman to weave stories around those lines. That was the hype when the album came out.)

Now, what about Tori’s sonic novel, "Scarlet’s Walk"?

There is supposed to be a story slithering across Amos’ latest album, stringing the songs together. This is a sorta search for "America," a post-9/11 meditation on life, love and all the sweet etceteras, a kooky cornflake travelogue, a — the horror! the horror! — concept album. Well, if I wanted to hear bombastic concept albums with interesting storylines, I’ll put on "The Wall" or "Tommy." There’s Rick Wakeman for pompous histories, there’s Frank Zappa for overblown satires, but for short aural diary entries, I’ll play Tori. (After all, music, as someone once argued famously, is not an Ezra Pound or a J. R. R. Tolkien anthology). And the truth is I’m too lazy to pick out the narrative threading "Scarlet’s Walk." Besides, each song has the ability to stand alone, except perhaps for Wampum Prayer. That’s how strong the tracks are.

Standout cuts are: Amber Waves, a song about a porn star, every boy’s sweet dream and paper cuts, as well as healing machines that glow in the dark; A Sorta Fairytale with its three-chord keyboard comp and waywarding thoughts from Tori; the Kurt Weillish Wednesday with its ingenious tempo and mood changes; Mrs. Jesus with its elliptical lyrics; and Another Girl’s Paradise with its soaring melodies.

But my favorite tracks are Taxi Ride and Your Cloud, which showcase Tori’s sensibilities and ability to confront personal ghosts (plus her gift for pinning down fluttering melodies). Scarlet’s trip continues in Taxi Ride, supposedly about the death of a friend in Baton Rouge, as she sings, "And I’m down to your last cigarette and this ‘We are one’ crap as you’re invading this thing you call love...but I’m glad you’re on my side... Got a long taxi ride, got a long taxi ride."

Her eloquence also shines in Your Cloud via the line, "Where the river cross crosses the lake where the words jump off my pen and into your pages." She even poses a philosophical question: "If the rain has to separate from itself does it say, ‘Pick out your cloud?’ "

Oh yeah, great atmospheric keyboards on this album; nice to hear the Rhodes, a jazz fusion staple, again. I’m not sure if the "David Torn" credited on Crazy and the title track is the same David Torn known for making avant-garde shredding albums, but, nevertheless, those songs have really tasteful textural guitars courtesy of that fellow Torn.

A caveat: The album is too looong, clocking in at around 70 massive minutes. It’s hard to listen to the whole disc and not be depressed or put in a "desul-Tori" mood. This is not a bus ride over the highways of broken-down America, with friends and stopovers. This is more like sitting on the backseat of a hearse watching the sad landscapes, the sad freaks of the fifty states go quickly by. The result of Tori’s kookiness, I suppose. (Which may be a good thing, considering that other femmes are brainlessly telling us to "get the party started" or get naugthy and "dirrty.")

I also feel that Amos’ music is caught in a sorta time warp. No remarkable changes at all. No apparent growth. (Her flirting with electronica — the Bush-y, Smashing Pumpkin-y, No Doubt-y route — doesn’t count.) It seems I didn’t miss much by skipping "Boys for Pele," "To Venus and Back," etc. Joni Mitchell, on the other hand, went from the sad-eyed, folk-pop chanteuse of "Blue" to the world-weary folk-jazz wanderer of "Hejira," and gave us musical diamonds in the process. It maybe unfair to compare the two artists. Maybe not going anywhere or staying stagnant sonically is Tori’s trip all along. We just don’t know, with the way her kooky mind works. Her aesthetics have the same zip code as Stonehenge.

So, let my panadero neighbors gyrate to impossibly lousy songs like Objection Tango by Shakira or Look At Me by Gerri Haliwell. Let my slightly loony friends listen to loony Bjork and PJ Harvey. Let Aiza Seguerra and all ‘em female "singer-songwriters" play the shit out of the Indigo Girl’s Power of Two and Tuck & Patti’s version of Time After Time. Let ‘em be. I would just shut them all out with Tori Amos and the strange and beautiful rides she promises.

Rating: ðððð

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