Music CD - Tori Amos: Boys for Pele

	Music CD: Boys for Pele Artist: Tori Amos List Price: $11.98 Our Price: $1.20 Your Save: $ 10.78 ( 90% ) Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours Manufacturer: Atlantic / Wea
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Tracks: 1. Beauty Queen/Horses 2. Blood Roses 3. Father Lucifer 4. Professional Widow 5. Mr Zebra 6. Marianne 7. Caught A Lite Sneeze 8. Muhammad My Friend 9. Hey Jupiter 10. Way Down 11. Little Amsterdam 12. Talula 13. Not The Red Baron 14. Agent Orange 15. Doughnut Song 16. In The Springtime Of His Voodoo 17. Putting The Damage On 18. Twinkle
Binding: Audio CD EAN: 0075678286223 Label: Atlantic / Wea Manufacturer: Atlantic / Wea Number Of Discs: 1 Publisher: Atlantic / Wea Release Date: 1996-01-23 Studio: Atlantic / Wea
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Spotlight customer reviews: Customer Rating: Summary: Putting the Damage On Comment: Let me say this first: Boys for Pele, in its entirety, is perhaps my favorite album of the 1990's. Though my concept of musical tastes is increasingly diverse, Pele remains at the top. This could be the best journey through the end of a relationship I've ever encountered. There are a lot of different ideas flowing on this particular LP, From the haunted opening of "Beauty Queen > Horses" to the subtle, somber, and yet somehow hopeful "Twinkle," this album will surely not disappoint. From anger to sadness, acceptance to understanding, it's all here. Lyrically it's a "typical" Tori Amos album, a bit on the abstract side, but reading between the lines is what draws me to her earlier releases. A lot of these songs have a strong backbone in the harpsichord, which gives it a timeless quality, and it's difficult to look at this specific release in individual tracks. The whole concept behind Pele is not like that of her other releases, it's almost as if she opened her journal and put everything she had on tape. In fact, I have the tree (on the disc itsself) tattooed on my back. This album is a gem to be cherished for years. I think I owe Tori my sincere gratitude. "Thank you to Pele, and those who brought me to Pele." Customer Rating: Summary: Exotically good!!! Comment: I've never heard of tori amos before until my father brought me her cd all the way from china, i tried to listen to the album. Thought the siongs sounds so exotic and unique espcially the beat and tempo of the songs. well anyway just wanna tell the world that i really like the song "caught a light sneeze", i just love the intense of the emotion of the song it's just so affecting me.. Customer Rating: Summary: Bloodletting... Comment: doesn't begin to describe this creative offering of Tori's. If you're a seasoned listener,than yes,this piece is the excellent,eclectic fix you've been looking for (whether you realized it or not.) However,if you're new to Tori,this might not be the best album to start out with. The opening track is very haunting,to say the least. From there on she does everything from venting,to flirting,to begging to looking for a good shag. This is by far her most experimental effort to date. Fave tracks,personally,are Blood Roses,Professional Widow,Caught A Lite Sneeze,Doughnut Song,Talula and In The Springtime Of His Voodoo. My point being....buy the damn album. =D Customer Rating: Summary: Her best album (that I've heard so far), but incoherent for the most part . . . Comment: This is probably going to break a few Tori Amos' fans' hearts, but, despite that I think this is her best cd, I find so many flaws within it. Most of the problems lie with the strange lyrics -- okay, and I know Tori is really artsy and unique, but I still don't like many of the lyrics anyhow. Fiona Apple is a much finer lyricist, and her music stands the test of time, while Amos' sorts of becomes weary. I won't fault Amos' passion -- she's got plenty of it, but still, she really needs to work on more coherence in her compositions. As I said before, while I understand her method of quirky artistry, it's still a bad sign when I'm changing the songs because they're becoming annoying. Customer Rating: Summary: A soundtrack for the assassination of sheriffs, everywhere. Comment: In this record, Tori Amos mixes Victorian instrumentation with Southern Gothic motifs, rising from dirty mattresses to confront the machismo that has soiled them. When Tori's symbols are vacuumed from the void of obscurity where she has consecrated them and reconstructed, the magnitude of her feminism approaches the absurd. But it's no more absurd than the Christianity of most major baroque and classical composers, who seized every opportunity to characterize each rhapsodic moment in their own compositions as an underrealized attempt to musicalize God's grandeur. In "Blood Roses," a song that juxtaposes being a prostitute and having received a clitoridectomy (as the removed flesh has historically been some African villages' favorite brand of chicken feed), the second person has fallen victim to a (pimp? tough customer?) who enjoys "killing her after she's dead." The victim's only method of coping becomes to silence her own sobbing. In "Muhammad My Friend", Tori risks going the way of Salman Rushdie to sing to the founder of Islam about the great swindle, the irony of which only the two of them and Jesus can fully appreciate: the fact that Jesus martryed himself to create a more popular version of the preexisting Judaic ethos, which stigmatized the female enjoyment of sex and shamed the female participant in the sexual act for the sin which its own patriarchal order had attached to it, in its ignorance of the classical Teiresian observation about the relative potency of the forces which would elsewhere be characterized as burning bush and raging volcano. Perhaps the highlight of this record is "Little Amsterdam," a blues-rhythmed plea for amnesty from a crime which is simultaneously confessed and denied by an indirect victim of racial hatred who has recently convalesced from the confusion caused by her situation. Throughout the record, Tori's narrators summarily fail to "take it easy," and one of them metamusically fails at the beginning of "In The Springtime of His Voodoo." The result is a challenging, far-from-complacent record dripping with potent albeit inexplicit social concern, and intervals of silence between notes which sometimes threaten to consume the listener's soul. I can't imagine that a devout Christian or Muslim would appreciate this type of music much, but hey, they have Evanescence and Bach to listen to. I would, however, recommend this album to anyone who has read this far into my review without suspecting it would disgust them. More Reviews
Editorial Reviews: Boys for Pele, the title of Tori Amos's epic third album, is as awkward and confusing as the music inside. Though it sounds like a recruitment slogan for Little League soccer, the name actually refers to the lost temples of feminine divinity. Pele, you see, is the Hawaiian volcano goddess; the boys, well, they're the sacrifices that quell the rumbling lady's rage. Attempting to regain fires stolen long ago, Pele rewrites the crucifixion to star a girl Jesus and in doing so conjures a forgotten matriarchal mythology. While Amos's characters--Jupiter, Muhammad, Lucifer--are male by name, the aural landscape into which they're thrown is as symbolically and expressionistically female as Georgia O'Keeffe's skull-and-roses paintings. Pele is a complex and formless--and often impenetrable--work of gothic-pop chamber music, both beautiful and ghostly in its nearly complete reliance on Amos's rolling Bosendorfer grand piano, chilling harpsichord (which she bangs like a courtly punk rocker), and acrobatic voice (as earthy as Joni Mitchell's and as otherworldly as Bjork's). Unfortunately, she takes us only halfway: her songs engage and challenge us to understand, but the imagery offers few clues to help us crack their frustrating opacity. Pele ends up as much a pretentious and self-indulgent trip as it is a synthesis of talent, imagination, and skewed vision. Still, there's reason to celebrate that an album as formalistically and thematically alien to pop audiences as Pele would win such quick success upon its original release. --Roni Sarig