FEATURE:
Second Spin
Tori Amos - From the Choir Girl Hotel
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THE first three…
albums from Tori Amos are classics in my view. Her 1992 debut, Little Earthquakes, is one of the finest debuts of the 1990s. It announced her as a bold, memorable, phenomenal and varied songwriter who was among the most important voices around. The songwriting by Amos through the album is incredible. Crucify, Silent All These Years, Winter, China, and Me and a Gun are so affecting and accomplished. After such an acclaimed and complete debut, many songwriters may have struggled to follow it up with a second album that matched the debut. 1994’s Under the Pink is another classic. With songs like Cornflake Girl in the ranks, it is an album that continues along the same lines as Little Earthquakes – in the sense that it is piano-driven. The lyrics are less confessional and personal. I adore both albums. 1996’s Boys for Pele, whilst slightly less acclaimed, was a switch of direction. The album was recorded in rural Ireland and Louisiana. The songs on the album incorporate harpsichord, clavichord, harmonium, gospel choirs, brass bands and full orchestras. Amos wrote the tracks and was the sole producer for her own album. It was the young songwriter deciding that she needed to guide her own vision and not repeat herself. It is another tremendous album. Highlights include Professional Widow.
By the time of her fourth album, From the Choir Girl Hotel dome write it as From The Choir Girl Hotel or From the Choirgirl Hotel), we were hearing a very different artist to the one on Little Earthquakes. Released on 5th May, 1998, it is an album that won positive reviews. I feel there were some that are quite mixed. Also, one does not hear songs off of From the Choir Girl Hotel played as much as cuts from Amos’ first few albums. Maybe that has something to do with the fact that the fourth album steps more into Electronic and Rock. It is a great album that definitely won some fans. In addition, From the Choir Girl Hotel gave Amos strongest debut to date in terms of U.S. sales - selling 153,000 copies in the first week alone. It is a shame that fantastic songs like Spark and Raspberry Swirl are not heard more. We associate Tori Amos with tracks like Cornflake Girl, Professional Widow and Crucify. I wonder how many people have heard songs from the brilliant From the Choir Girl Hotel?! I want to bring in a couple of reviews for the album that are a little mixed. I will then balance that with two positive assessments. I would urge everyone to listen to From the Choir Girl Hotel. It is a magnificent album with many highlights.
Whilst most reviews have been positive, there are a couple of mixed ones for From the Choir Girl Hotel. In their review from 1998, this is what NME had to say:
“Sure, only a fiendishly callous misanthrope would dismiss the very real, very painful events endured by Amos - not least the recent miscarriage that inspired this record - but her luxuriant soul-baring and indulgent assumptions soon grate. "You're only popular with anorexia", she sighs on 'Jackie's Strength', instantly forcing a whole world of victimhood upon the listener. Yet for all the passion, all the intensity, there's something strangely inert about 'Songs From The Choirgirl Hotel', as if all the emotion were recorded in the dead air of a lightbulb, the audience looking in through the glass, asked to admire and sympathise entirely on her terms.
This is the infuriating indulgence that the confessional needs to avoid if it's not to make you take to the streets with a machete; the unbridgeable gap between Kurt Cobain and Eddie Vedder, Kristin Hersh and Alanis Morissette, between expecting applause for pulling out your heart and bleeding, and having the discipline to use a scalpel and a paintbrush.
All of which would make 'Songs From The Choirgirl Hotel' utterly intolerable, were it not for the fact that it's often musically intriguing, a conscious effort by Amos to move away from her pianocentric horizons. The opening 'Spark' rains down in a cloud of Cocteaus-esque gloom, while the crazed 'Raspberry Swirl' is genuinely sexy, Tori convulsively growling "let's go" over a rogue-robotic pulse. Even 'Jackie's Strength', despite bringing those Giants Of Rock Mark Cohn and 10,000 Maniacs to mind, manages to be prettily affecting. Yet Amos' creative use of unpredictable rhythms comes across not so much as a new language, but as the same old language spoken by someone with a lousy grasp of syntax. At its best - on 'Iieee' and 'Cruel' - she shows the ill logic of an organic Tricky, cracking open a chilled, Martina-cool groove. At its worst, it's the self as show-and-tell, the messy splatter of 'She's Your Cocaine' or 'Liquid Diamonds' as irritating as an acid bath on sunburn.
It would be easy to believe Tori, hanging from a heartstring, is just giving, giving, giving. In reality, all she does is demand”.
Pitchfork also reviewed the album. Although they liked a couple of songs off of From the Choir Girl Hotel, they were less impressed by the remainder:
“The lengthy Boys for Pele followed in January of 1996. Amos was becoming extremely experimental, and her music now overshadowed the lyrics, formerly her obvious forte. Musically, Pele took a bat to everything Amos had previously released; it was her most melodically beautiful creation ever. But in most cases, whatever points Tori was trying to drive home were lost in her nonsensical, stream-of-consciousness poetry.
So what of From the Choirgirl Hotel? As always, Amos has managed to turn out a couple of truly great songs. The beautiful "Black-Dove (January)" is a stunningly gorgeous piece whose creepy, delicate imagery is perhaps some of Amos' best work since Under the Pink's "Bells for Her." The first single, "Spark," about Amos' recent miscarriage, is powered by her realization of denial. ("You say you don't want it/ Again and again/ But you don't really mean it.") But perhaps the finest moment on Choirgirl is "Jackie's Strength," a song that remembers the sadness every woman felt for Jackie Onassis the day John F. Kennedy was assassinated. The haunting piano and string section, accompanied by Amos' fragile vocals and moving lyrics ("Shots rang out/ The police came/ Mama laid me on the front lawn/ And prayed for Jackie's strength") match each other effortlessly, making this one of the most powerful songs in Amos' repertoire.
The rest of the album, as it turns out, doesn't stack up against Tori's past releases. Several of the songs sound frighteningly alike, and the musical accompaniment seems to draw more inspiration from bad industrial and dance music than Leonard Cohen and Joni Mitchell. But while Choirgirl houses some of Amos' less interesting performances, it also occasionally showcases electrifying work. We'll hope it marks a transition to something bigger and better, but let's not get attached to the idea”.
As I say, I really like From the Choir Girl Hotel. It shows that Amos could shift and change her sound and remain vital and consistent. Her production work is also excellent. In their review, this is what AllMusic noted:
“Shortly before she began work on From the Choirgirl Hotel, Tori Amos suffered a miscarriage. While she was recording the album, she married her long-term boyfriend. As expected, both events cryptically wind their way into the album, which arguably has Amos' most personal lyrics since Little Earthquakes. The surprise is, From the Choirgirl Hotel is considerably more accessible than its immediate predecessor, Boys for Pele. Tori has opened up her sound by working live with a full band, bringing an immediacy to her sound that has never been heard before. Added to that are samples and drum loops, ballads supported by eerie, sweeping strings and heavy guitars -- everything she played with on Pele has come to fruition here. All the while, she's kept the perversely cryptic, convoluted lyrics that have always marked her work, yet the lines that connect have more power and savage wit than ever. Besides, Amos' songs have an interior logic of their own. Until now, it seemed that she could only deliver them on her own, supported by her piano, a guitar, or strings. With From the Choirgirl Hotel, she proves that with a little aural experimentation and muscle, she's as potent and powerful as any modern rock artist”.
Just before wrapping things up, I am going to finish with a feature from The Guardian. Alex Macpherson explains why From the Choir Girl Hotel is so important to him:
“It's certainly not irrelevant. Amos's lyrics were always too oblique to be as straightforwardly confessional as her reputation indicated; her preference for fragmented poetry, wordplay and private references seemed at times to convey an impulse to hide rather than reveal. References to her miscarriage appear throughout From the Choirgirl Hotel, but rarely in a simple way. On the elegiac, pedal-steel driven ballad Playboy Mommy, they set the scene for a not-quite-apology from a "bad mother" to her dead daughter. Lament, self-recrimination and self-justification combine in a character study of a compelling, complex narrator, its emotional climax coming with the line: "I'll say it loud here by your grave – those angels can't ever take my place."
The sheer craft of Playboy Mommy still astonishes – something that applies to the album as a whole. On Choirgirl, Amos catapulted herself out of the piano-and-vocal mode that had formed the majority of her work to date. A variety of richly detailed, percussion-dominated arrangements characterise the album: demented electronic loops (iieee), swirls of marimbas (Cruel), crunching cock-rock (She's Your Cocaine). Having hit No 1 in 1996 with Armand van Helden's house remix of a Professional Widow, Amos seemed inspired to make a four-to-the-floor dancefloor banger herself in Raspberry Swirl, all pounding beats, aggressive sexuality and percussive gasps of breath.
Liquid Diamonds lives up to its title, aqueous and luxurious, as Amos submerges and re-emerges from a sea of drums, bass and piano. On Hotel, she goes so far out that, even 13 years on, it sounds like nothing else: tactile drum pads, 8-bit synths, shrieking vocals and cascades of piano culminate in an absent-minded fairground organ melody. None of it makes sense, but it's utterly captivating. (This even extended to the album's B-sides, with a highlight being a full-throated, drum-heavy cover of Steely Dan's Do It Again.)
From the Choirgirl Hotel is not a typical Amos album – that would be the more traditional singer-songwriter fare of Little Earthquakes. But it came in the centre of a stretch from 1996-99 during which she seemed to be pushing the form further out in every direction at once – more intense, more complex, more experimental – and, in pulling it off, becoming an even more powerful artist. Despite her largely unsung influence on today's singer-songwriters, both male and female, Amos's combination of conviction, catharsis and vision feels worlds away from the relatively timorous aesthetics of her followers, from Joanna Newsom to Bat for Lashes. There is still no one remotely like her”.
I shall wrap it up there. If you have not heard From the Choir Girl Hotel, then go and give it a spin. Whilst not regarded as highly as Tori Amos’ first few albums, it is a hugely impressive record. Her fifteenth studio album, Native Invader, was released in 2017. I hope that Amos puts out more albums, as she remains one of the most extraordinary and vital songwriters we have. The remarkable From the Choir Girl Hotel is proof of her…
PURE brilliance.