Practicalmadness

Tonight, fulfilling my duty as a loyal-to-the-hilt Tori Amos fan, I picked up The Beekeeper, her latest. And as I was using a computer at work to load it onto my iPod shuffle, I found someone had loaded up the new CD by Chicago indie rocker-comix artist Archer Prewitt and so I grabbed it for listening on the way home.

And I found myself playing a strange game where an unfamiliar song would come on and I would guess: “is this Archer or is this Tori?”

That I could even play this game made me realize a sad truth: Tori is off her game. The songs on Beekeeper are solid, still in the same vaguely alterna-pop vein as her last record, 2002’s Scarlet’s Walk. Moreso, really: whereas Scarlet was deceptively pop and proved, on subsequent listens, to be one of Tori’s richest albums (and on listens subsequent to that to be deep in a very shallow way), so far there’s nothing really remarkable about the new one. When I hear a nondescript pianos-and-electric guitar intro and have to wonder whether it’s Tori or another, completely different artist, there’s something seriously wrong behind the prison town.

Now iTunes is playing her duet with Damien Rice, which sounds almost exactly what you’d expect from the generic concept of a duet with Damien Rice: a ballady song sung in a pleasing, forgettable way. But this is Tori. We expect more from Tori because, well, she’s nutty as a fruitcake but has a troublesome history of making flawed, extremely interesting work.

Apart from that unmistakable voice, an accent somewhere between English precision and Southern molasses, there’s no stamp on these songs to say that it’s her. Change the singer and this could be a Rachael Yamagata record, albeit one with really fucking spectacular piano work.

How do you know Tori’s off her game? If you find yourself really digging a song of hers in the moment with no lingering scars or memories from the one before it, if you can enjoy it as pop music without any of the baggage that comes from being in such a decidedly unique emotional space, that’s how you know. You know in the same way that you meet someone you know very well, and after a few exchanged words immediately know that they’re hiding something from you.

And it’s something little, something personal but not that personal, something really not worth sharing in the final analysis. But it means that she, your friend, has de-friended you to a certain extent. You’re not even privy to her minor secrets anymore. A once-intimate relationship reduced to the gentle patter of coworkers or casual friends or friends of friends.

In other words, the point where Tori, an artist I know very well through the work, is as easily accessible as an artist I’ve hardly met. Like Archer.