A review of Tori Amos' "Night of Hunters"

Of all the artists to choose to do an album like this, while Tori Amos wouldn't be my first choice, she has certainly done it very well.

Night of Hunters would probably have been better realized as a series of short films...or tapestries...or a leather bound collection of gold inlaid etchings.

The first thing Tori said about this massively ambitious project is as follows:

"It's a 21st century song cycle inspired by classical music themes spanning over 400 years.  I have used the structure of a song cycle to tell an ongoing, modern story. The protagonist is a woman who finds herself in the dying embers of a relationship. In the course of one night she goes through an initiation of sorts that leads her to reinvent herself allowing the listener to follow her on a journey to explore complex musical and emotional subject matter.  One of the main themes explored on this album is the hunter and the hunted and how both exist within us."

...what?

Seriously though, I love that, in this sad world of the three-good-songs-per-forty-two-minute album, Tori Amos puts out a seventy plus minute, high concept piece with more than one track over eight minutes in length.

This lady...has got balls...Goddess Balls.

And that is why we loves her.

For the first time since "Under The Pink", Tori recruits some guest vocalists (and, no, I'm not including the schizophrenic cast of "American Doll Posse", which had Tori playing a handful of different women, complete with different social networking pages and wigs/occupations) to help create and explore the vast world of Night of Hunters, namely, her daughter and niece.

The addition of these young women adds such a surprising sense of freshness and life to the songs they're in that it's actually quite shocking to hear them.

Her daughter, Natashya Hawley, appears on only four of the fourteen tracks, but she does so much to shift the dynamic of each song.

Her niece, Kelsey Dobyns, (who, according to the "making of" video for the album is playing the Fire Muse) only shows up on one of the last tracks, but has very much the same effect as Tori's daughter.

Natashya has a wonderfully soulful, husky quality to her voice, but sounds incredibly playful as well, like some little imp.

She provides a perfect juxtaposition to Tori's refined, aristocratic mutant singing.

It's as if the songs they share are rushing rivers with both ancient, polished river stones and ragged little pebbles that keep getting tossed around.

The whole thing is chock full of goddess imagery and references that I will never comprehend as I have a wang (Who are the Seven Lords of Time? Who are the Seven Sisters? Are they related? Is this a Dr. Who reference?).

Then again, I don't really understand a thunderstorm, but I can appreciate its power and beauty.

Sadly, there's a lot less to take from a thunderstorm (artistically) than "Night of Hunters" and I found myself not getting everything that Tori was aiming for.

Probably this is my fault, but, unlike one of my other favorite concept albums, Bowie's "Outside", I knew enough to get what was happening (more or less) and what the songs were about (more or less), whereas with this album, I really had no idea what was going on three quarters of the time.

I feel the album would have been better off, or at least more accessible, with a clear beginning, middle and end.

Musically, this album is completely different from anything Amos has done before; all the instrumentation on Night of Hunters is provided by an octet and Tori's Bosendorfer, allowing her to avoid the recent alarming trend in her music: the dreaded encroachment of the terrible malady of Adult Contemporary "Rock".

This arrangement enables Amos to create something that sounds timeless and epic as opposed to something you'd hear on Lite 106.7.

"The Chase" puts one in the mindset of a chapter from Neil Gaiman's Sandman, with Tori being "hunted" by her daughter and changing forms to escape her, a playful song that reflects dark overtones of the coming of the hunters.

"Battle of Trees", one of the longest songs on the album, has clear-cut movements, starting with a disconcerting theme plucked on a single string and later expanded by the piano, as does "Star Whisperer", which has a dark depth of fear and danger inherent in the music and lyrics.

The darkness on the album is balanced nicely with the wistful, sad smile of "Job's Coffin", sung almost entirely by Natashya, and the whimsical, sweet back and forth between the two of them in "Cactus Practice".

"Carry", the final track, works as both a single and as an album closer, although, musically, if feels less complex than a lot of the rest of the pieces. With its themes of remembrance and loss, it feels a bit like "1,000 Oceans", the closer from 1999's "To Venus and Back".

My favorite moment on the entire album though is the second half of "Edge of the Moon", mainly because it reminds me of older Tori but with the classical instrumentation. To be honest, I would have been happy if the whole album sounded more like it.

I think this could be the start of an interesting phase for Amos' music, perhaps one melding both this classical arrangement and her more typical backing band.

Fingers crossed...

Again, if the album came with those aforementioned leather bound gold inlaid etchings, I might have enjoyed it more, understood and appreciated it more deeply.

But, whether I got it or not, it's lofty and beautiful and smart and brave as hell.

Tori is asking a lot of people with Night of Hunters, and, if they dedicate themselves to this work, I seriously believe that their efforts will pay off.