Wearing Pink

Love the voice: fragile, breathless, catch-in-throath. Can we leave things here? No, I thought not. How about if I remark that I quite admire her concert-style, personalised piano playing. Would that be enough? Oh hell, you're pushy. Thing is, Tori can be a bit wearing after a while. All that imagery and lines that sound like random words superglued together in a manner John Cage might have approved. Like her hit single, 'Cornflake Girl', much of this sounds alternately like jaundiced Joni and batty-as-ever Bush, though thankfully, she would seem to have redeeming sense of humour, asking God 'Sometimes you don't come through, do you need a woman to look after you?'. Weird-world.

Whatever it is that passes for Tori Amos's selling points in the British pop market - the novelty of her American expat/UK residence status, her fetching looks - I sit here beside myself fighting nausea. Under The Pink is the most unpleasant (non-trash) album I've heard this year. How can one be so pretensious, irritating and boring, all at the same time? Caught in some limbo between anxious punk and snooty singer-songwriterism, Amos blends traces of every Joni/Judy/Phoebe/Janis type you can name with a certain dissonant Anglicism, resulting in a stylistic mess wich can only appeal to late twenty-something male reviewers with the hots for redheads**. You might think that this equals 'originality' (something to value above all else) but my wife eliminated that possibility when she shouted from the kitchen as Amos turned up on Top Of The Pops, 'Oh, no, it's not that Kate Bush again?' Good gawd, do I hate this album.

Any album that throws Fred and Ken into such sharp relief has to have something going for it. And they're not alone in having their equilibrium upset by Ms Amos. The Daily Telegraph reckons it is 'a good, odd, record', while The Observer is disturbed to find that 'most of the songs are little more than allusive fragments'. Melody Maker feels it is 'like this weird hippy chick babbling ceaselessly in the corner' but Making Musicis more positive, assigning Amos the status of 'a worthy descendant of the Laura Nyro/Joni Mitchell school of songwriting', while Q noted that 'she's taking a long, hard look at the relationship between women and what lies under the coquetry of a certain kind of femininity.' Admittedly the shock-novelty of her debut is gone but, despite obvious comparisons with la Bush and others, Amos is definitely developing her own musical and intellectual personna. Provided she doesn't go stark staring cornflake, I'd see this as a challenging and 50% enjoyable step on the way to a long and worthwile career.