By Laura Cress
So the deal is this. Tori Amos, a woman who could be described as having slipped off the ship deck of sanity for a short spell in the sea of stupidity in her last album Abnormally Attracted to Sin, has now decided to release a “seasonal album.” This contains re-workings of traditional Christmas carols such as “Star of Wonder” as well as some Amos originals for good measure.
It was therefore with a little bit less than baited breath that I listened to the first song, What Child, Nowell, but amazingly I wasn’t forced to bang my laptop repeatedly shut over my head just to drown out the noise. The only part I found strange was the chorus where Tori sings the famous lines ‘Nowell’. because, Because this is a re-working, the rhythm has been completely changed – that second Noel is now hanging on for forever and a day, leaving the other poor Noels out in the dark.
And that seems to be the main problem with this collection. Whilst it’s nice to see somebody rework tired songs and make them interesting again, everybody has been programmed since about the beginning of every September to listen to Christmas songs being blasted out at us. Therefore they’ve become such a tradition that changing the rhythms but leaving the main lyrics as the same just seems a bit unnatural.
Nevertheless, there is something very Christmassy about the arrangement of instruments that made me wistful for the winter, so in some dimension this does work as a Christmas album. The original Tori Amos songs, such as the jazzy Pink and Glitter actually work better because of their detachment from traditional Christmas songs, although her insistence that we must ‘shower the world’ perhaps show some OCD tendencies that need attending to.
All in all, unless you’re a hardcore Tori Amos fan, you’ll probably just use this as background music whilst the family are too stuffed to talk after the Christmas dinner, but there are still some occassional beautiful melodies that deserve a second listen.