Abnormally Attracted To Sin (Vinyl)

By now there must be a division of Tori Amos fans--the ones, like myself, who like her earlier work, and the ones who like what she has done over the past decade. I'm sure there are die-hard fans like myself who subject themselves to everything Amos, and who might be lulled into a comfortable coma that feels (on the surface) blissful, but then the inability to come to sets in.

"Abnormally Attracted To Sin" carries on the Amos tradition set forth by "Strange Little Girls" back in 2001. Slick production, that also sounds flat and bland--like it was made behind a wall. Amos's clever and wry lyrics about the same old subjects--religion, sin, womanhood, etc. Plus her inimitable vocals which don't reach the dizzying heights of her earlier work anymore. She sounds like she's been taking Valium for the past decade, lazily churning her own butter, far from the taste buds of her adoring fans.

There's nothing here to get excited about. The songs come and go with no particular track standing out. This is just like her last three albums, and what's strange is she jumped record labels only to make the same album for a fourth time in a row. All of her albums this decade have been overstuffed (can Amos actually make a 40 minute album? She seems musically challenged to do so).

"Welcome To England" is a mediocre first choice as a single. What's she singing about? I don't know, I fell asleep already. To her credit, I liked "Give", "Maybe California", "500 Miles", and well, all the songs are just fine, really. That's the problem--there's nothing compelling or gripping here. Amos is supposed to represent intensity, originality, experimentation. All gone. It all died after "To Venus And Back" in 1999. Amos has gone through a longer blue period than Elton John.

Wake up and smell the coffee, Amos. Oh wait, that's all you've been doing for the past decade, because it's the only place your music has been heard--at Starbucks across the U.S. I expect more from you. I want my money's worth. Surprise me next time.

Here's how "Abnormally Attracted To Sin" compares to her other work:

1992 Little Earthquakes: Five Stars
1994 Under The Pink: Five Stars
1996 Boys For Pele: Five Stars
1998 From The Choirgirl Hotel: Five Stars
1999 To Venus And Back: Four Stars
2001 Strange Little Girls: Two Stars
2002 Scarlet's Walk: Three Stars
2005 The Beekeeper: Three and a Half Stars
2007 American Doll Posse: Three and a Half Stars
2009 Abnormally Attracted To Sin: Three Stars

Lots of people are moaning about this album on these pages. And I am honestly not sure why. Tori's voice sounds terrific, the lyrics are intelligent and the music is rich and melodious as well as interesting, colorful, and diverse. All on one CD clocking in at over 72 minutes! Who else bothers to do this these days - or can? I certainly don't want Tori to start kicking out 40 minute albums like every other recording "artist". She has more to offer and thankfully does so with a rare and rewarding consistency. Is the texting generation now so attention-span challenged to actually consider this a liability? Pitiful. And as for the ad-hominem attacks, they are utterly pointless and not worth rebuttal. I have every Tori Amos album and they are all excellent on their own terms. AAtS is no exception. In fact I have listened to it now for the 7th time in the 4 days since I bought it. So if you have found immersion in a Tori Amos record in the past a pleasing experience you should expect nothing less from this piece of work because the girl has still got it - in spades!

In the midst of such volley of criticism, I feel the need to redress an imbalance. This album is Tori's tautest, most exciting effort in (exactly) a decade. Many a fan has noticed (mostly with dismay) the change in direction in her music after "To Venus and Back", an abrupt change whose somewhat disheartening harbinger was an entire album of covers, "Strange Little Girls". What distinguished her subsequent output was a situation whereby diminishing melodic inventiveness was made up for (as we have seen happen so many times with lesser artists) by an inflation in para-musical aspects: the underlying "concept", the production, the duration, all of which became rather sprawling and overblown.

As of 2000, in other words, Tori began to sound--surprisingly--like somebody else. More specifically, in my opinion, she began to sound like Sheryl Crow on a good day (nothing wrong with that, except that we're talking about Tori Amos here, a unique artist whose first stunning string of 5 masterpieces inured listeners--unfairly, no doubt-- to expect excellence as a matter of course). The softer, folkier, more upbeat, mainstream sound which permeated "Beekeper" and "Scarlett" I felt only skimmed the surface of her reservoir of talent.

The albums, mind you, were not bad by any normal standard (not even the least of them, "Beekeeper"): the point is, perhaps, that they could have easily been made by somebody else. They ceased to be unmistakably Tori's, as her uniqueness only surfaced in glimpses and twists, diluted over an ever-lengthening landscape of not-so-essential songs enslaved to a fastidious, often Byzantine "concept" arc.

A return to form was announced by American Doll Posse. The editing laxity was still rampant, but her Sheryl Crow routine (enriched by echoes of Juliana Hatfield, among others) reached heights that Sheryl herself could never have attained. And there was a lot of Tori-ness to it too, more so than in the previous two albums, so things were indeed looking up. (She is indeed one of those artists who draw their musical strength from their dark side, rather than their sunny one: and in Posse, luckily, the dark side is back: which means, thank goodness, no more bees and vineyards!)

And now comes "Abnormally Attracted to Sin". At first sight, the 70+ minutes spell an alarming continuity with her interminable predecessors. But after the second listen, the sonic landscape reveals a tightness that had been missing since the astounding "Choirgirl Hotel", and the melodic inventiveness is back around those apices. There is hardly a dispensable song in the lot (one or two tops: and, let's be frank, not even her early masterpieces were untouchable in this respect), and so many are excellent ones, worthy of the old Tori. The lyrics are marvelously hermetic, the voice mangles away at English phonetics (who else could make "Tennessee" sound like "Genocide"?), warping and dragging vowels like she's channelling Billie Holiday, and the old INTENSITY is back--although, as some have noticed, further removed, and a bit over-rehearsed, even antiseptic. But we can hardly expect from Tori the same spontaneity she exhibited 20 years ago. Or maybe we should say "spontaneity effect". For, let's not forget that spontaneity is mostly achieved through hard work. Despite what the film "Amadeus" would like us to believe, even Mozart was known to tweak, fix, tinker, and agonize over his best work.

To get to the selection: As one perceptive reviewer put it, "Give" is probably the strongest opening since "Spark" (from "Choirgirl"), with a serpentine pentatonic streak running through it. "England" is quietly beautiful, "Vine" deliciously twisted and dark. "Flavor" is ok, perhaps a little too conventional, "Dying" sounds straight out of the best part of "Posse", "Maybe California" is one of her standard intimate ballads, "Police" is a real tour de force, infectious, dark, and rich in melodic and rhythmic invention, "That guy" (the most Billie Holiday-esque) moves me to tears, "Curtain" and "Fire" are sinuous enough to sustain interest throughout, "Sin" gets under your skin (no pun intended), "500" is maybe dispensable (meaning: it could have been on "Beekeper"), "Mary Jane" is the old let's-expose-the-obscene-puritan-underbelly Tori back on top, "Ophelia is majestic, and "Lady in Blue" possesses the timeless, hypnotic, monumental beauty of an old Blues song (like Sinatra's lunar rendition of "Baby won't you please come home" from "Where Are You"): what an amazing way to end a great album.

In my opinion, then, "Abnormally" is a sure-footed return to form after a decade of uneven, meandering, generic music. Of course, as we set out to write reviews, we should never forget how extremely subjective a listening experience is bound to be. My highly unprofessional yardstick is the following: an album is really exceptional if it manages to bring tears to my eyes at least twice (by the time of my second or third listen, that is: and I'm not talking about an emotional upheaval brought on by words per se, but rather by a certain melodic/harmonic progression, like the piano flourish that introduces the bridge "You gotta bring your own sun" in "Welcome to England", or the breathtaking "Make up to break up" chorus in "That Guy"). Those two episodes alone are worth--if we want to be prosaic--the price of the album. Enjoy!

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