For a classically trained pianist, Tori Amos sure likes to play it rough. On the cover of her third solo album, Boys for Pele, the North Carolina native poses as a hardened hillbilly woman living the primitive mountain life. She sits in a beat-up antique rocking chair; her bare thigh, emerging from a torn skirt, hangs over an armrest, while her muddy calf and foot are perched in midair. She holds a shotgun across her lap, dead game birds dangle on a string next to her, and enormous snakes crawl under her feet and around the porch. She looks as if she’s endured a hard day in the woods, except that her hair is groomed with salon-perfect wildness, her makeup professionally applied and touched up.
It’s the perfect image to represent the 18 songs inside. Amos strives to create harshly intimate songs that jar and provoke, but she’s acutely aware of the glamour of her aggressiveness. Her piano-and-vocal presentation is elemental and combatively personal, yet she always remains conscious of her untamed persona: She knows that a forceful sexual presence can help carry a colorfully nonsensical lyric. She breathily whispers across barely tapped piano chords, begging listeners to pay close attention. And when she seems to be on the verge of revealing something extraordinary, it turns out that she’s just teasing, combining purposefully outrageous lines with clashing images that never divulge any truths or messages.
Stream-of-consciousness imagery can be potent when played effectively off of a musical arrangement or when arranged to concoct a stirring whole. But Amos’ non sequiturs hint at revelation and never amount to anything. Her songs toy with the highly publicized nightmares of her past: the stern-preacher father, the religious upbringing, the strict private schools, the violent rape, the controlling boyfriend. According to Amos, she invokes these recollections and then deals with them in cathartic bursts that purge her subconcious. But on Pele she refers to her oppressive past in lyrics that do little more than sensationalize her pain.
Amos still has her moments, but they’re rarer now than on Under the Pink or Little Earthquakes. “Caught a Lite Sneeze” finds her yearning for female company while surrounded by men. Over a harsh, drum machine-powered rhythm track, she smirks, “I need a big loan from the girl zone.” Her tone is as light and playful as her words.
“Horses” displays what she does best: It’s a well constructed piano piece that rolls with moody dynamics. Amos packs the song with powerful images that obliquely refer to a woman’s need to get away from her man. Though she hints at conflict, she never diminishes or degrades her former lover. Instead, she cites her own demons as the reason why she must leave; to cast them from her soul, she explains, she needs to be alone. Amos acknowledges that it’s not easy to leave a loving relationship, and she credits her ex for teaching her some important lessons. She ends the song with the album’s most beautifully stated line, “Threads that are golden don’t break easily.”
In “Blood Roses,” she weaves grand piano, an amplified harpsichord and a harmonium organ into a warlike procession rife with danger. As part of the ritual of breaking from her longtime lover, she divulges secret thoughts, conjuring up images of blood, fowl, roses, New Orleans, loons and flutes while shouting at a man who can’t hear her. “I’ve shaved every place that you’ve been,” she repeats.
Most of the album relies on such disturbing images, but rarely does Amos shock with such deliberateness. Indeed, it can be liberating to speak in harsh, confrontational terms, but Amos’ startling sentences and fanciful scenes never merge into something memorable or meaningful. In “Father Lucifer,” she addresses the subject of the title, taunting, “How’s your Jesus been hanging?” And in “Professional Widow,” she purrs, “Honey, bring it close to my lips, yes, don’t blow those brains yet. We gotta be big, boy, we gotta be big, starfucker, just like my daddy, just like my daddy selling his baby.” The song seems be about men drunk on power and machismo, and women burdened with nurturing and neglect. But, as with every song on this record, that’s a guess at best.
Elsewhere, Amos courts controversy by drawing on the familiar feminist conceit that Jesus was actually a woman. She opens a song with the line, “Muhammad, my friend, it’s time to tell the world we both know it was a girl back in Bethlehem.” But the song quickly devolves into silly scenes: “What about the deal on the flying trapeze,” she sings, “got a peanut butter hand but honey do drop in at the Dew Drop Inn.” Later, in a stanza that mentions Moses and the Hawaiian volcano goddess Pele, she tacks on, “Gladys save a place for me on your grapevine till I get my own TV show.” It’s one of the many head-scratchers that fill each song.
On “In the Springtime of His Voodoo,” Amos casts a compelling arrangement by drawing on New Orleans rhythm-and-blues, but her words sap the song’s musical power. She opens with a direct quote from the Eagles, “I was standing on the corner in Winslow, Arizona,” then coyly states that she’s in the wrong song. A few errant images later, she leaps in with, “Got an angry snatch, girls you know what I mean,” and then launches into an impossibly thick segment concerning warp speed and Star Trek’s Mr. Sulu.
Amos often cites “faeries” as the source of her lyrics. If so, it sounds like her little leprechauns are having a bit of fun with her these days, just to see what they can get away with. Working without ex-producer and ex-boyfriend Eric Rosse, Amos no longer has someone to guide her away from some of her more fanciful indulgences. She makes a big deal about wanting to run free, without patriarchal guidance. But on Boys for Pele, she wallows in her independence and takes too much delight in her ability to do whatever she pleases.
