Pros: The incorporation of trip-hop elements into Tori's work creates a dark, ambient sound.
Cons: There are just too many songs, a lot of which are mediocre.
The Bottom Line: I can't dispute Tori's talent - but "Abnormally Attracted to Sin" is evidence that she needs either a new producer or a long period to recharge her creative energies.
floatingcity's Full Review: Abnormally Attracted to Sin by Tori Amos
After the dissolution of her contract with Epic Records, it was a surprise when singer-songwriter Tori Amos announced that she had both written a new record and teamed up with a distributor who would afford her more creative control. The resulting product is “Abnormally Attracted to Sin”, yet another seventy-minute behemoth exploring Tori’s time-tested topics of religion, oppression and feminine sexuality – and one whose length threatens to cause its total collapse.
The first myth to dispel here would be any expectation of Tori’s altered economic circumstances provoking a change in her approach to the album as an art form. It’s been nearly a decade since she released a streamlined twelve-track LP, and it’s become increasingly obvious that she has a paralysing inability to self-edit – everything seems to pass her inclusion criteria, and the mass amount of divergent styles and topics bloats the album beyond having any kind of thematic or sonic unity. This is ultimately frustrating, as the better material on “Abnormally Attracted to Sin” is some of her best since 2002's “Scarlet’s Walk”, enriching otherwise-mediocre melodies with dark percussion loops and ambient synthesisers to intriguing effect.
The second assumption to waive is that going ‘indie’ would have rejuvenated the overall songwriting. I can flat-out say that nothing on here approaches Tori landmarks like “Winter”, “Spark” or “Caught A Lite Sneeze”, and despite the proliferation of synth sounds, there’s been no true evolution – instead, it’s more like “Scarlet’s Walk” meets a less-intricately-arranged “To Venus and Back”, with Tori’s husband Mark Hawley (credited as “Mac Aladdin”) stepping in to slather everything with cheesy pop-metal guitar riffs.
Anyway, let’s start by weeding out the atrocious songs. The witless marijuana tune “Mary Jane”, hilariously bad ‘rocker’ “Police Me” (featuring the lines “To get off he cries ‘Slutty Goth!’/ But I’m a brightly coloured person”) and the boring, one-note “Oscar’s Theme” are all easily jettisoned, and the tearjerking-by-numbers piano ballads “Ophelia” and “Maybe California” do nothing that Tori didn’t do better on multiple occasions during the “Little Earthquakes” and “Under the Pink” eras. Likewise, "500 Miles" (with a beautiful bridge and emotionally cathartic climax ruined by a horrendously dippy, Kidz Bop vocal melody) and the Fleetwood Mac “Tango in the Night” reject “Fire to Your Plain” should be relegated to B-side status, while the otherwise dynamic pop-rocker “Not Dying Today” could do with a lyrical rewrite to eliminate Avril Lavigne-style lines like “Dyin’/ Fryin’/ I’d rather have a lie-in!”
Now that I’ve done Tori’s editing job for her, the resulting record is a perfectly serviceable slice of spacey, dark trip-hop and cabaret, which makes up for its dearth of hooks with an abundance of smoky atmosphere. Opener “Give” and the title track languidly snake along with slow-burning piano and percolating synths, with the former grooving along steadily thanks to a well-chosen mix of live and programmed drums, as well as Tori taking greater advantage of her vocal range. The steady drip of “Flavor” also works wonderfully; being a cousin of “To Venus and Back”’s “Lust” with a simple echoing beat, minimal keyboard accompaniment and selective use of Auto-Tune to conjure the image of free-floating in space.
Other highlights include the bitter study of women, aging and the entertainment industry in “Curtain Call” (the one track that approaches the emotional honesty of Tori’s Nineties recordings, as she bluntly declares “By the time you’re twenty-five / They’ll say you’ve gone and blown it / By the time you’re thirty-five / I must confess, you will have blown them all”); the theatrical orchestration of “That Guy” – an instance where the inevitable Kate Bush comparisons are actually warranted – and the after hours jazz-influenced closer “Lady in Blue”, which finishes with a great full-band workout that even Mark’s obnoxious “Guitar Hero” fantasies can’t spoil.
Given that this is an eighteen-track album, I’ll spare discussing them all and point out that “Abnormally Attracted to Sin” is essentially a record of two halves – one of a forty-something woman who’s apparently uncertain about where she stands in the music industry (and it seems at home, given the lyrics to the songs “Welcome to England” and “Starling”), and the other a set of half-baked pop throwaways and corny macho-rockers that try (and fail) to conceal the pained undercurrent running through the first half. Such is the story of Tori these days (and has been ever since 2005's “The Beekeeper”), and to me it seems that until she’s willing to fully reconnect with the raw, unflinchingly honest self-exploration that characterised her first four solo albums, we’ll keep getting overstuffed records that attempt so much that they succeed at little. Either way, “Abnormally Attracted to Sin” is worth picking up if you’re a latter-day Tori supporter, but lapsed fans are unlikely to find much beyond a couple of songs to lure them back to the fold. 3 stars.
Epinions.com periodically updates pricing and product information from third-party sources, so some information may be slightly out-of-date. You should confirm all information before relying on it.
- Add to My Yahoo!: 
- Add to Google Homepage: 
© 1999-2009 Shopping.com, Inc.