NYTimes review 2/6/94

[Peter Byrne Manchester <PMANCHESTER@ccmail.sunysb.edu>]

OK, it's a week later and this isn't for sale any more, so:
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RECORDINGS VIEW

Two Sisters In Song...  Of Sorts
By Peter Galvin

       When Tori Amos burst onto the pop scene last year with her album 
"Little Earthquakes," critics were hard pressed to find a label to describe 
the singer's exceedingly personal, exuberantly melodic music.  Was it pop, 
folk or rock?  Was Ms. Amos a musical earth daughter tapping into the 
primordial emotions of the human heart or just some crackpot offering the 
most self-absorbed brand of feminist spiritualism?  Regardless of the many 
critical opinions Ms. Amos's arrival engendered, the one thing almost 
everyone agreed on was that she sounded a lot like Kate Bush.
       Listening to both artists' new albums, Ms. Bush's "Red Shoes: and Ms. 
Amos's "Under the Pink," one easily hears the similarities between the two 
singer-songwriters.  Both have high, frilly voices capable of conveying 
girlish insouciance, pouting allure and shrieking madness; both write piano-
based melodies heavily influenced by the emotional sweep of classical music 
and the drama and bombast of opera; and both possess a keenly imaginative 
romantic sensibility that challenges patriarchal notions of love, sex and 
religion.  But Ms. Bush is more of a musical philosopher than Ms. Amos, 
divining meaning from her experience and giving it universal scope.  Ms. 
Amos's songs are like psychological case studies, providing listeners with a 
vicarious catharsis rather than any actual insight into existence.
       Emerging in 1978 amid the abrasive anarchy of the British punk 
movement, Ms. Bush's debut album, "The Kick Inside," as a musical anomaly, 
what with its heady art-rock arrangements, baroque vocals and grandiloquent 
literary allusions.  Subsequent albums found Ms. Bush experimenting with 
musical textures through the use of synthesizers, multilayered vocals and 
world-music instrumentation.  Ms. Bush was seeking increasingly complex ways 
to express the landscape of consciousness and the soul's connection to God 
and the supernatural world.
       On "The Red Shoes" (Columbia 53737; CD and cassette), Ms. Bush, 35, is 
in a wiser, less breathlessly romantic mode.  Gone is the grandiose mysticism 
of songs like "Wuthering Heights" and "Running up That Hill."  Instead, Ms. 
Bush's quest for meaning is more earthbound, concentrating on the pangs of 
the heart and the joys of the flesh.  In the breakup ballad, "You're the 
One," Ms. Mush places the listener firmly in the real world as she sings to 
her ex-lover, "It's all right, I'' come 'round when you're not in/ And I'll 
pick up all my things."
       In the Eastern-flavored "Eat the Music," Ms. Bush connects sex with 
food, imagining herself a piece of fruit; "Split me open/ With devotion," she 
demands jubilantly.  The music, too, is much more intimate than on her past 
efforts.  Ms. Bush no longer sounds as if she's addressing the heavens; her 
vocals now rarely reach their former ear-piercing levels.
       The album's title track, based on Michael Powell's 1948 movie of the 
same name, illustrates the tragedy that can result when dreams and reality 
collide.  An aspiring dancer puts on a pair of red shoes and dances herself 
to death to the furious sound of lute and zither.  Another song about fate, 
the funk-driven "Why Should I Love You?," a track Ms. Bush wrote and recorded 
with Prince, contemplates the spiritual forces that conspire to bring two 
lovers together.
       Ms. Amos is less concerned with what brings two lovers together than 
what happens to them when they connect.  On the affecting "Little 
Earthquakes," the singer sang of her sexual awakening at the hands of men who 
were interested only in her body and who lorded their power over her as if it 
was sent straight from God.  Elsewhere on "Earthquakes," Ms. Amos detailed 
her disillusionment with religion and the pain of forging an identity in a 
world that wants you to be something you're not.  The songs melded Ms. Amos's 
melodies with studio touches like sampled keyboards and strings, expertly 
giving the singer's passionate songs their due.
       On "Under the Pink" (Atlantic 82567; CD and cassette), Ms. Amos, 30, 
refines her cabaret-meets-classical style, almost completely forgetting the 
use of guitars and drums.  Instead, she interprets her melodies mainly with 
her piano, which she plays to gorgeous effect.
       The singer is in a less confrontational mode on "Pink."  Indeed, the 
only song in which Ms. Amos actually confronts an oppressor head on is also 
the most studio-enhanced:  on "God," the singer taunts the Creator for being 
sloppy and lazy, with sampled screeches giving the track a predatory quality. 
Yet, as on "Earthquakes," Ms. Amos continues to use her personal experience 
to challenge religious and sexual conventions.  In "Icicle," she sings about 
masturbating in her room while her family is downstairs saying their 
prayers.
       Unfortunately, the singer seems a bit strapped for provocative subject 
matter on "Pink."  Many of the lyrics are frustratingly oblique, as if Ms. 
Amos is trying to hide the fact that she doesn't have much to say this time 
around.  Because the impact of her music depends so much on her confessional 
approach, the third-person, observational stance of several of the songs on 
"Pink" renders them emotionally flat.
       Perhaps now, having seemingly exorcised many of her personal demons, 
Ms. Amos will turn her gaze outward, translating what she sees and feels into 
a more universal vision.  After all, it works for Kate Bush.
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       Peter Galvin is an associate editor of Interview magazine.

<Photos:  KB from right side in ETM dress, head turned toward camera.
              Credit:  Anthony Crickmay/Columbia Records
          TA from hips, fitted leather blouse, belt, hands joined below it.
              Credit:  Cindy Palmano/Atlantic Records

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New York Times, Sect. 2 (Arts and Leisure), Sunday, February 6, 1994, p. 24.

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                                                            Peter Manchester
     "Hear a woman singing"                    pmanchester@ccmail.sunysb.edu
                                                    72020.366@compuserve.com