My wife is awesome for many reasons, one of which is her amazing ability to get me to like good music I should have liked in the first place. Back when I was in college she labored for literally months to get me to listen to Radiohead’s OK Computer, a thankless task until I finallly heard the first notes of “Airbag” and began a three-week jag of listening to that album and that album alone 24 hours a day. More recently, she got me into Interpol after I had written them off as trendy rip-off artists (they’re neither) and Queens of the Stone Age’s Songs for the Deaf after I’d written it off as spotty and dull (it achieves what Alvy Singer might call “maximum heaviosity”).
Her latest stroke of genius is reintroducing me to Tori Amos’s latest, Scarlet’s Walk. When I was in high school I got into Tori right around the same time I got into Pantera, and for the same reason: Trent Reznor liked them both. I loved Tori’s first three albums, and still do: they’re haunting, beautiful and brutal. But she started to lose me on the producery From the Choirgirl Hotel, and she shook me entirely with the double-disc To Venus and Back (the first disc of which seemed like a fairly spectacular failure to become Bjork and the second of which, a live performance, seemed unenjoyable unless you’re part of the hermetically-sealed world of Toriphiles, aka Ears with Feet (don’t ask)). At that point, I kinda preferred to make believe that she had lost weight and recorded two great records under the name “Fiona Apple.”
But Tori’s covers album, Strange Little Girls, was a return to form: the arrangements were sparse, tense and genuinely creative, with the usual riveting guitar work by King Crimson/Bowie/NIN axeman Adrian Belew and fascinating versions of songs from “Enjoy the Silence” to “I’m Not in Love” to “Heart of Gold.” Scarlet’s Walk follows in that project’s footsteps, with tons more attention to songcraft, allowing her vocals and piano to go unsmothered by electronic noodlings. It’s a long album without a weak track in which each song serves a different and vital purpose. My favorites, “Crazy” and “Your Cloud” (as well as the wonderful single “A Sorta Fairytale”) are as different from each other as they are from every other song on the album. Much has been made of the whole “It’s Tori’s take on post-9/11 America,” but it’s Tori’s take on her own voice, instrument and relationships that make it great.
So thanks, Ferg, for doing what you usually do: pointing out all the wonderful things I overlook.
Chorus: Awwwwww.