lambchops's Full Review: Scarlet's Walk by Tori Amos
Flaming red hair, explosive vocals, and a piano characterize Tori Amos. A southern Christian girl at heart (her daddy's a minister), Amos has since the early 1990's carved out a fantastic career. She is respected as a singer, musician, and songwriter alike and at the same time she has gained a massive audience she has earned a fair amount of critical acclaim.
However not everything Amos has done has rubbed me the right way. I was none too fond of Boys for Pele, Hey Jupiter, and parts of From the Choirgirl Hotel (though admittedly other parts were magnificent). I've enjoyed other albums like Little Earthquakes, Strange Little Girls, and Under the Pink greatly but still--I always doubted Amos' overall ability to craft a cohesive album. A vignette she is capable of, but a cohesive and concise album? Maybe not.
Scarlet's Walk (2002) is a painfully unrewarding album. There are songs that sound pretty and songs that are minimally entertaining, but the overall impression that the album (the sixth of new material from Tori and her career seventh) is that it lacks direction, is unremarkable, and monotonous. As with everything from Tori Amos I aspired to like it--I expect to be impressed by the innately gifted singer-songwriter.
The first album from the songstress on her new home at Epic, Scarlet's Walk seems to be an attempt by Amos to recapture the direction of her earliest solo efforts. It's grandiose, sweeping, and almost orchestral in nature. Unfortunately, it's also pretentious as unnecessarily complex. I like Amos best when she doesn't try too hard--on Scarlet's Walk she's trying way too hard to be profound. In fact, even the "concept" of the album is ridiculous. It's a travelogue at the same time it details a journey through womanhood. For all Amos' highbrow effort, the album comes off as hollow and often unemotional. I want to buy into her "concept" but I cannot. It's just a mediocre (at best) effort.
Part of the problem with Scarlet's Walk rests in its length. There are eighteen songs which run the gamut in quality. Amos could stand to learn some editing skills--brevity could have helped to make the album more interesting. The singles are smartly the best offerings on the album. A Sorta Fairytale, Don't Make Me Come To Vegas and Taxi Ride are all standouts. I'm impressed most by A Sorta Fairytale. Like so much of the album, it is pure pop. If nothing else, the album should appeal to folks who previously thought Amos was too "artsy fartsy." This particular song is the most massively appealing with a gorgeous piano, strings, and of course vocals. Amos possesses one of the most distinctive and ethereal voices in music today as evidenced by this lovely selection.
Don't Make Me Come To Vegas and Taxi Ride also entertain but for different reasons. The former contrasts percussion with listing vocals and a lovely melody. It's not exactly a groundbreaking song, but it's entertaining. Taxi Ride is lovely and sparse and evocative, though like so much else here it almost entirely lacks the quirkiness that first drew me to the singer-songwriter. The production across Scarlet's Walk is clean and professional. I wish it wasn't so perfectly tweaked. There are indeed times when grit and grime can add character.
A few other songs are worth checking out. Amber Waves, Pancake and Carbon are all fine enough songs. However, the goodness of these tracks is weighed down by the badness of others. I've complained in the past about Amos' use of drum machines and she falls into this same old pattern on Strange. She sounds so bland and uncreative. The song would have benefited from dropping the percussion entirely. Also particularly troubling are songs like the a cappella Wampum Prayer which sounds out of place among the other songs, Sweet Sangria which has a fabulous melody and vocal style drowned out by drum machines, the lounge-act style of Your Cloud, the atonal and boring Another Girl's Paradise, and the unnecessary album ender Gold Dust.
All in all, I feel that Scarlet's Walk starts out boring and gets worse as it progresses. If it seems as if I've only spoken about a handful of songs, it is because the rest are absolutely forgettable. Amos has proven in the past that she is a creative, dynamic woman with a way with words and the piano. This album is by no means representative of her talent. I'm bored by the milquetoast approach of this album and the generic production. Amos could have done so much more. I hope that her eighth album will be a vast improvement over this unmemorable recording.
Rating: 2/5 stars
Track Listing:
01. Amber Waves
02. A Sorta Fairytale
03. Wednesday
04. Strange
05. Carbon
06. Crazy
07. Wampum Prayer
08. Don't Make Me Come To Vegas
09. Sweet Sangria
10. Your Cloud
11. Pancake
12. I Can't See New York
13. Mrs. Jesus
14. Taxi Ride
15. Another Girl's Paradise
16. Scarlet's Walk
17. Virginia
18. Gold Dust
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