DIVING DEEP LIVE is her latest release, issued this month, 12 tracks on vinyl lp or 16 on digital or CD. I wasted money on the vinyl so you didn't have to. In order to be fair, I also streamed the 16 track version and that only made it worse, much, much worse.
Tori emerged in the grunge era. With her self-titled debut album, she took her place as one of alternative rock's greatest artists. Not a mediocre one, not a so-so one, not just a good one but an all time great one -- she was operating at the same level as, for example, Greg Dulli and Kurt Cobain. More and more, in recent years, she's squandered the talent and played down to the audience. That can actually be traced to her passive aggressive stops in the southern US beginning in the '00s. If you went to one of her concerts and she started for no reason playing "Dixieland," that was her signal to her band mates that she felt you were a bad audience and she was mocking you as a racist. You don't respond loudly enough to her means you're a racist? In her mind it apparently did. She thought it was funny to make fun of paying customers and for some reason was stupid enough to think racists might ever attend a Tori concert. This is the woman who took photos allowing pigs to suckle her bare breast (see the photos on BOYS FOR PELE) and she thought the conservatives were still out there rooting for her?
She's never been very smart.
Which is why she spent two decades testing her fans patience.
The last great studio album was SCARLET'S WALK in 2002. THE BEEKEEPER was a grab bag that contained some strong songs but didn't really work as a whole. Then came her ambitious AMERICAN DOLL POSSE which never really worked as a statement -- she tried to pretend she was ssuming varios voices but what the fragments -- two tracks of less than a minute, four of over a minute -- really proved was she struggled at this point to actually write a song. Next came a better album thematically, ABNORMALLY ATTRACTED TO SIN, in which every unattractive key she could find became the basis for a song. MIDWINTER GRACES was weak and phoned in. NIGHT OF THE HUNTERS was a small improvement, a very small improvement. The talent was questionable at this point. GOLD DUST only raised the issue of where was the talent and where was the inspiration as she re-recorded songs from her earlier albums draining the life out of them in the process. This garbage sent fans packing.
Now to be clear, an artist needs to explore. Joni Mitchell, for example, took two studio albums to explore her muse (and you can even toss in the live album SHADOWS & LIGHT) before returning to popular music. In that brief time, Joni lost fans that never came back. But she was exploring and she stretching and she did come back. And when she did, as the albums that followed demonstrated, Joni came back stronger as a songwriter.
Where's Tori?
She wasted our time exploring on our dollars and then released UNREPENTANT GERALDINES and some -- including me -- were treating it as a great album. It wasn't. The same thing happened with WILD THINGS RUN FAST -- Joni's return to pop. I judge it Joni's worst album and always note that we were all just so thrilled to have Joni back that we graded it on a curve.
UNREPENTANT GERALDINES let Tori finally get another top ten album but, in the end, it's an embarrassment. The music could have been done a cheap 64 key Casio keyboard. There was no digging into what life means or what love means or any image we could share.
WILD THINGS RUN FAST was followed by Joni with strong albums such as DOG EAT DOG (a classic in need of a critical re-evaluation) , CHALKR MARKS IN THE RAINSTORM, NIGHT RIDE HOME . . .
Tori? She's followed UNREPENTANT GERADLINES with the disappointing NATIVE INTRUDER -- so bereft of inspiration, ENshe's singing about the God willing and the creek don't rise as though she'd invented that tired and ancient phrase -- and then OCEAN TO OCEAN which is her all time worst studio album. It's also the first album in her entire career that failed to crack BILLBOARD's top 100.
She toured around the world for about two years behind that bad album. I have no idea how the tour went over in other countries; however, in the US, even scaled down to third-level arenas, she couldn't fill venues. A Tori tour, in the past, was something to see and tickest sold and sold quickly, even in the '00s. Her most recent tour did so poorly that you could wait until an hour before the concert started and find tickets for sale online -- still find them.
Only the extremely dedicated and those who enjoyed seeing a car crash bothered to attend.
Now you or I, we'd realize, "I've losing my audience with each album. I've got to stop f**king around and putting out bulls**t. At least I have to if I want to continue to record."
But Tori lives in a land of delusion as she makes clear in one idiotic interview after another in the last years. Her sounding board is her daughter and her daughter's boyfriend.
Hmm.
That's really sad. A grown woman turning to still unformed minds for a critical sounding board.
That goes a long way to explain the deep, deep dive that her talent has been on for two decades.
"Cornflake Girl" is the single off the album.
It was a great song. Back in 1994 when it first showed up on UNDER THE PINK. A great live version showed up on 1999's TO VENUS AND BACK.
This is not a great live version on DEEP DIVE LIVE. In fact, it goes to how shallow the talent pool has gotten.
As you listen, note the applause to this and other songs and grasp how "polite" is the most generous term for the audience reaction -- and grasp that most live albums sweeten the audience reaction so it was probably much more stand offish at the actual peformance.
She's got nothing on this album. A few good songs -- all from the 90s.
Some might try to say "Mother Revolution" (from 2003's THE BEEKEEPER) is worth listening to.
I strongly disagree. I love "In The Springtime Of His Voodoo" from 1996's BOYS FOR PELE. Love it. Think it's a masterpiece. I don't need "Mother Revolution" reworked in an arrangement that echoes and steals from "In The Springtime Of His Voodoo."
I've long noted Tori Amos poses as a feminist. And I've long noted that the only woman she works with is her daughter -- who has a nice vocal range but lacks any conviction when she sings. I've pointed out that feminism isn't a concept we give lip service too, it's something we either live or don't live. And Tori always has to be the sole 'girl' surrounded by men when she's in the studio or on tour. This new album features her long time boss and master and dom Jon Evans but he's joined by a new drummer. Ash Soan. Tori finally adds a new drummer and not only is he too tired to bring anything to the project -- over fifty and no visual for the stage -- but he is a he.
Tori wants to play the feminist. She wants us to embrace "sister" and "mother." Yet she's done 16 studio albums and 3 live ones and she's always playing with men. Feminist? Sounds like a groupie, sounds like a dumb groupie with a ghost written book entitled I'M WITH THE BAND. As the sixties concluded, Judy Collins was touring with a female drummer. Groups like the Mamas and the Papas, Fleetwood Mac and Heart could blend female and male members. The Bangles, The Go-Gos, Klymax and many other bands could feature an all female line up. All of that done in the last century. But to this day, Tori's studio band and touring band is her supported by men.
It just reminds me how Tori refused to be part of Lilith Fair and, in fact, mocked them and put them down to various outlets (including NEWSWEEK). She was too good for that.
Or she thought she was.
As she delivers another bad album -- and during Christmas no less -- it's time to seriously rethink Tori. When she emerged as a solo artist with 1992's LITTLE EARTHQUAKES, I had already moved on to CDs. In the last years, vinyl has made a strong return. I only have two Tori Amos vinyl albums -- LITTLE EARTHQUAKES and UNDER THE PINK -- both of which I bought at Barnes & Noble in 2019. That's all I've got, her first two albums. And, looking back now on the long career, that's really all I need.