Tori Amos - Little Earthquakes
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Free Music Notes for Little Earthquakes
Free Music Review: A Tori Classic.
Hit: 5 Stars
This is a wonderful CD.
Tori Amos did a great job on this CD. She sings and writes beautiful lyrics. This is great from start to end. This is a fantastic debut by a female artist. There is no other words to say how much I love her music.
Some of the the stand-out songs are Silent All These Years, Precious Things, Little Earthquakes, Me And A Gun and Winter.
Free Music Review: Unique among singer-songwriters
Hit: 4 Stars
Intimate may perhaps have been coined to describe music such as this. The way Amos is miked allows you to hear every trembling sigh and every gasp. But she doesn't stop by letting you hear her, she tries to make you feel even her most torturous secrets. This focus on intimacy is at once the greatest strength and biggest liability of the album.
When it works, you find yourself painfully discomfited. On the acappella "Me and a Gun", Amos recalls a rape incident where she fights to keep herself alive because she "hasn't seen Barbados so I must get out of this". The stream of consciousness lyric invests the tale with the punch of a heavyweight. "Leather" trades in emotional warfare ("Look, I'm standing naked before you, don't you want more than my sex?"). Self loathing winds its way through "Crucify".
But other tracks are so personal that it's hard for her listeners to "connect". I'm assuming that ""turbid blue and the drugstores too safe in their coats and in their do's, yeah, smother in our hearts, a pillow to my dots" means something to Tori, but it doesn't mean a heckuva lot to me. ("Girl")
It's 14 years later, though, and more of this sounds great than doesn't, so it's a debut better than most and one she can still be proud of now.
Free Music Review: It's pretty good, but not a classic
Hit: 3 Stars
It almost impossible to find a halfway objective review of a Tori Amos album on here - either her music gets lavishly praised by those creepily obsessed "Toriphiles", or it gets rubbished by people who think she's just Kate Bush-lite. I have no strong opinion either way about her music - I am drawn to some of it because I love music with just voice, piano and haunting melodies. This album has some of that, but it also has some not so great songs. To be honest, I sort of like this album and I sort of don't. A reflection of that is that I have purchased it twice and sold it again twice subsequently!
First of all, I think that as a male, it's slightly more difficult for me to listen to this music than for a female. It has a certain feminine perspective that can be alienating. Now I love most of Joni Mitchell's work and other female artists such as Fiona Apple, and their music is very "female", but this is an altogether different experience.
For me, exactly half of this album is wonderful - 6 tracks. Those are "Crucify", "Silent All These Years", "Winter", "Happy Phantom", "Leather" (the highlight) and "Little Earthquakes". The rest range from pleasantly forgettable to downright boring. The much lauded "Me And A Gun" is so personal and difficult to listen to that it's embarrassing. And for someone who doesn't really care about Tori's lyrics all that much, it's boring as well because there's no music. Go on, deride me for my insensitivity or whatever - I know the song is about her rape experience - but sorry, I had to press the skip button every time.
The main problem overall with this album though actually has nothing to do with Tori or the songs - it's the production. This is frankly the most dated sounding album from the 90's that I've ever heard. Voice and piano should be timeless, but listen to "Crucify" and the title track - great songs, but production-wise it's stuck in a time warp.
So overall, this album isn't really the classic it's made out to be. Half of it is great, as I said. Unfortunately, it all went downhill after this album, with Under The Pink being one of the more impenetrable works I've ever encountered from a mainstream artist. That doesn't necessarily make it bad, but it makes for a pretty underwhelming listen.
In the end, this is what I did: Got rid of Little Earthquakes (only half decent) and Under the Pink (collecting dust on my shelf), bought the "Cornflake Girl" single (her best and most accessible song), which has a fantasic b-side called "Sister Janet" and another quite good piano "suite". Then I bought the "Crucify" EP, which gives me 2 out of the 5 songs I liked on Little Earthquakes ("Crucify" and "Winter") plus 3 terrific covers - "Angie", "Thank You" and "Smells Like Teen Spirit". This is all the Tori I'll ever need I think and with this limited selection I think of her as a good artist and a terrific pianist, rather than someone who released a couple of good songs and a lot of overwrought garbage.
I await your unhelpful votes!
Free Music Review: Best place to start with Tori
Hit: 5 Stars
I'll keep it short, because after 324 other reviews, singing the praises of this album and how it changed my life would probably be a bit repetitive.
She's done a lot since this, of course. If you don't like this, you most likely won't like the later stuff. If you do, though...well, just wait. Tori's material gets (let's just say) a bit trickier from here, but it's very much worth the time you might spend getting to know it. Buy slowly and savor.
Standing purely on its own, _Little Earthquakes_ does not falter in the slightest. There is no finer debut by any singer-songwriter in the '90s, period.
Free Music Review: A love affair
Hit: 5 Stars
There are no words. This is a masterpiece. Tori has captured my mind and my heart. This album stands alone in perfectiondom. If you don't have this album--for God's sake, get with it!