Boys for Pele

by

Tori Amos

Edit

With the hopeful words 'And if there's a way to find you, I will find you/For threads that are golden don't break easily,' from its brooding first song, 'Horses,' it is clear that, on Boys For Pele, Amos is off questing. There is an implied invitation to follow, but Amos is increasingly an artist's artist, her songs musically and lyrically hieroglyphical and untranslated. In the next song, 'Blood Roses,' one of the most visceral break-up ever songs committed to record, she confronts the Minotaur head on, and it becomes clear that the path she's on is the dark one leading into the labyrinth. Not an easy quest to take up, or follow down.

This album seethes with honest passion, ungainly, ugly, and destructive, in a more overt way than did the already aggressive Under The Pink (with its repetitive choruses of 'I want to kill this waitress/but I believe in peace, ...,' 'this can't be happening/you bet your life it is,' 'can't stop what's coming, can't stop what is on it's way,' the off-hand 'a few witches burning, gets a little toasty,' and the murderous 'Past The Mission')----in fact 'Professional Widow,' teeth bared, Medusa-head held high, scorches like nothing since Marianne Faithfull's Broken English. Since the album's title refers to men and boys sacrificed to the capricious Hawaiian goddess of the volcano, Tori's emotions (and untamed vocals throughout), as expressed, are appropriate. Loneliness, spiritual isolation, suicide, murder, death, masochism, and rapacity all make appearances, but, if one looks closely, only in passing: it is Amos's individualistic, spiritual striving that is the theme and real key to the record.

Fans and critics who accuse Amos of a direct and willful adversarial relationship with God (or 'God') are wrong. Amos's god-like or godly personae here---Pele, Lucifer, Mohammad, Jupiter----are living, vibrating metaphors with which she has opened and sustained a running, and, importantly, two-sided, dialogue. These fragile and suspicious exchanges, difficult if not impossible to understand literally, are shared here with the listener with all emotional blinders off, so even the most obtusely lyrical songs are understandable on an feeling level. Comparably, a person who doesn't understand Spanish or Latin dialects can still enjoy an album like Yma Sumac's Voice of Xtabay, whose meaning is all in Sumac's voice and intonation, or might as well be.

As the songs pass and fold brilliantly, chaotically, and wildly into one another, Tori herself, as a persona, becomes less and less apparent, as would might expect of someone harrowingly isolated. 'The way down,' she sings midway through the album's eighteen tracks, still descending, 'the way down, she knows.' At one point, on 'In The Springtime Of His Voodoo,' Amos finds herself not in her own composition but in the Eagles' 'Take It Easy' singing, "hey, I think I'm in the wrong song." Almost at the end, in the plainly masochistic 'Putting The Damage On,' which nonetheless has one of the Pele's loveliest melodies, we gain what might be direct, or only teasing, insight into the source of Amos's more pragmatic wounds: 'Boy, you sure look pretty/When you're putting the damage on.' Presuming she means he's putting the damage on her, feelings, acceptance and tolerance like that lead to pain, abuse, and self-hatred, there's no doubt.

Boys For Pele is a masterpiece and an incredibly brave work. Subsequently, Amos has withdrawn into strictly artificial personas, with very few exceptions. A far cry from the college girl-like Little Earthquakes, Boys For Pele will not appeal to the broad public. The photograph of Amos on the sleeve, guarding a primitive back-hills cabin with a shotgun, rattlesnakes around her feet, is interesting, as is the photo inside of Amos, in a rocking chair, nursing a piglet at her breast like an indiscriminate earth goddess, teat available to all in need. In another, the reflection of a nuclear family is visible in an oily puddle, as is an explosion, possibly a nuclear one: certainly this is a clever play of words, meaning and image. Shadowy children's faces peer through the dirty windows from the dark interior of the shack, suggesting abandonment, sorrow, and vulnerability, perhaps the way Amos felt as a child, or may have felt during the record's production.

However, the atmosphere of the record would be better represented by something like the photograph of Nico on the cover of her fourth solo album, The End, in which Nico, already half-sunk into her late decadent phase, naked at the shoulder, peers out pensively into an unknown and indiscernible gloom.

A 'special' version of a CD that is to be avoided at all costs. It was an attempt to cash in on the success of the remix of 'Professional Widow'. However anyone who bought this for the remix almost certainly hated the rest of the album, and anyone who bought the album as the whole would have hated having the remix slapped into the middle of it. The two styles (remix vs the rest) are so violently different it hurts.

If you want the album (and to me it rates 5 stars) get the regular version complete with 'In the Springtime of His Voodoo'. If you want the Professional Widow remix, buy the single. Just don't buy this triumph of commercial opportunism over musical taste.