Looking back on the 90s, we can safely say that female-singer/songwriter artists were a big fad. Yeah sure, Nirvana and grunge exploded in the 90s, along with a cohort of alt rock bands, but if you weren't an ironic white hipster with an affinity for pseudo-metally power chords and not-so-contemplative lyrics, the big thing to listen to was female singer-songwriters. (No, Britney Spears at the end of the 90s does not count, not even if you're Splat Out Plath.)
Now, in the early 90s, there was one girl that got really huge as a singer-songwriter. And I don't mean her 80s replica Kate Bush. This is Tori Amos, and even though she was relatively unknown, her debut album rent her path straight into the pop mainstream, paving the way for all the rest of them (yes, I'm talking to all you Canadian sweethearts.) It would be stupid to deny the influences this had on the whole style: because what we've got here is simply a good collection of catchy melodies, near-virtuosic piano playing and *gasp* Kate-Bush-isms in the vocal department.
However the big difference between dear Tori and Kate Bush is: she's got some lyrical honesty fiddling around on some of these tracks. Me and a Gun features no instrumentation, just Tori going a cappella as her diatribe on her rape unfolds with a drapery of emotional feminism. Elsewhere we get the official denouncing of relationships "Silent All These Years", or her Methodist Christian upbringing with "Mother". Call it confessional or dramatically overwraught, but the fact remains that many women (and maybe even a lost man with a sexuality problem) can identify far more with this than many of her colleagues.
This emotional backdrop to the songs make the pretty music tinkling all around the more relevant. She doesn't just sing about how she got raped, instead she encases it with delicious strings and pristine piano melodies all around. "Crucify" has an immediate hook as the opener, and the rest of the album is almost nearly equally consistent. Silent All These Years takes the precious piano meandering and gives it a snakelike vocal melody, whose fangs grip the listener quietly but intensely.
And the best part is, it doesn't translate into an album people buy for the singles only. Though not all songs scale the qualitative height of the more infectious singles, songs like "Winter", a neat piano ballad, or the edgy "Precious Things", complete with quasi-Nirvana guitars and more aggressive vocal delivery, the album's got more in store than most of her peers; and this honesty and immediate poignancy is what makes the album all the more relevant musically. Even if it's too intimate lyrically, it's got honest-to-God (it's only an expression, Tori!) hooks and enough sour/bitter with the saccharine to make it palatable to more than just the dedicated fans. And as such, this is probably (even though she's made some pretty damn neat albums after this), the most universally rewarding work in Amos' back catalogue.
