AMOS, TORI

It's been a long time since an artist as quirky and defiantly personal as pianist-vocalist Tori Amos exploded upon the pop charts. With her debut effort LITTLE EARTHQUAKES, Amos avoided popular trends and convenient pigeonholes: all at once she evokes an era of thrush-like sopranos, folkish confessionals, and daring new wave artists. The resulting music on her second Atlantic release, UNDER THE PINK, is brimming over with innocence and sensuality, spirituality and heresy. That she is able to confront all of these contradictions, let alone try to resolve them, makes for remarkably powerful music. In fact, UNDER THE PINK owes much of its potency to the feeling that we're watching Amos grow up before our very eyes. The daughter of a Methodist preacher, Tori Amos was a child prodigy on the piano, gifted with an exceptionally quick ear and a solid rhythmic feel. However, while pursuing her formal studies, she ran dead up against the rigidity of classical protocol, and her teachers tried to break her rather than channel her talents. Some of the emotional push and pull of this early artistic catharsis peeps through in the way Amos and co-producer Eric Rosse approach the multiplicity of piano sounds which inhabit UNDER THE PINK--sounds which symbolize the many feminine rites of passage depicted throughout the album. There are the child-like, half-remembered musings of "Bells For Her" and "Icicle" ("I think the good book is missing some pages"), and the vigorous attack of "The Waitress," "Cornflake Girl" and "God" ("God sometimes you just don't come through/Do you need a woman to look after you"). Here Amos' sense of alienation, rage and betrayal is echoed in offbeat rock textures and swooping vocal refrains suggesting the work of fellow traveller Kate Bush on THE DREAMING. Elsewhere, her vibrant vocal range and lush harmonies suggest early Joni Mitchell and even the ethnic-new age melange of Enya. The characters in her songs, however, are neither flower children nor navel gazers, but strong, vulnerable women coming to terms with their needs and longings in an often chilly world. UNDER THE PINK maps the inner journey of post-modern women and signals the arrival of a singular new singer-songwriter.

Estimated despatch 5-10 days after ordering.