Tori Amos - Native Invader

Drowned In Sound 90

It’s hard not to talk about the most embarrassing musician on the planet without it. It’s a reason why so many - probably the vast majority of people reading this - aren’t convinced. Tori Amos is camp, untrendy, outdated; an easy parody. She rattles frenetically at her piano like a sulking teenager, vocalises her vowels as though she’s trying to get her gob around a pear, and exerts a loss of control with excessive self-conduct. She has all the overripened orchestration of a West End production, with all of its hysterical frivolity. And yet — her music reaches the most severe loci of peoples’ lives. Her public display of pain anchors her to the past, yet she remains a cathect to the worst of times; to abuse and violence and trauma. Her fans have viewed her as a surrogate mother; a salve to their worst and most submerged memories. However, Native Invader finds Amos looking towards the ultimate mother – as she undertakes the quest towards Mother Nature.

What makes Native Invader a work of genius - a kind of Great American novel, perhaps - is that it seamlessly blends the personal, political, natural and cosmic into the same story. You can follow each of these strands in every song on the album; each category both perfectly resembling itself and the whole into which it is contained. For instance, in ‘Up The Creek', the phrase “God willing and the creek don’t rise” is one that Amos remembers her grandfather uttering to her as a child. Amos' daughter, Tash, harmonises the phrase with her over the persistent electro-pop strings, as a nod to her own invasion of Tori’s belly.

This album is buttressed by the terror of our current political climate, but it is more significantly a quest to counter it; to use “the militia of the mind.” That is to say: this is an album of resilience and not melancholy. Amos may have found the power to resist in the Tennessee Smoky Mountain area, where for her, the natural, cosmic, natural and political coexist. She undertook this trip around the time her mother suffered a stroke which left her permanently unable to speak, and Donald Trump’s presidency began. In ‘Wildwood’, Amos invokes Wiccan mythology to draw significance from her hikes around North Carolina’s woodland. She imagines walking off the pilgrim’s path’ with a talisman to guide her to ‘winter’s past’. She weaves through a wilderness of ‘Alders and the Oaks’ which bare a history of history of violence and renewal. She remarks on the parade of trees, who had been savaged by floods and fires, and learns that: “you can’t escape anguish/but how to live with it”.

This is the lesson that Amos puts forward in Native Invader’ She encourages us to invoke nature’s power of regeneration and renewal, as she ends her quest with the knowledge that human beings possess the resilience of nature. She draws on Greek mythology to refer to us as “Knowledge sown in Gaia’s bones” on the ritualistic ‘Up The creek’. On ‘Benjamin’ she even encourages us to reappropriate invasion. Singing over computer signals which sound like a 1960's conception of 'the future', she refers to the case of Juliana vs the U.S. – and encourages us to invade undesirable information in the digital age. The invasion of references and allusions – which may appear to be doggerel on first listen – are the key to infiltrating this bizarre masterpiece. They not only point to the idiosyncrasy of narrative itself, but give us the strength to combat our dominant and despicable white-people-against-the-world one. So, if the music sounds outdated then it should do. That's exactly what the winds of Donald Trump and fascists and Nazis carrying tikki torches are.

Pitchfork 75

The 15th album from one of pop’s most inventive composers as a braid of political, maternal, and celestial statements. Amos’ intricately arranged songs are passionate and despairingly poetic.

The Guardian 60

(Decca)

Tori Amos’s latest record is inspired by her mother’s ailing health and a sense of discontent at US society under Donald Trump (on Up the Creek she speaks of fighting against those “climate blind” with a “militia of the mind”, a far from oblique reference to a certain president’s fake news agenda). Across its 15 tracks, there are moments of greatness: Reindeer King is a swelling piano ballad about grief that boasts an ambient underside, while the aforementioned Up the Creek fuses a countryfied guitar loop with ominous strings, electro beats and backing vocals from Amos’s teenage daughter, Tash, to create a multifaceted soundscape. Elsewhere, Bang’s tonal shifts – from near-a cappella chorus to crunching riffs – make it a grownup coda to Cornflake Girl. However, much of this album is forgettable: Broken Arrow and Cloud Riders are passable pop-rock for the Starbucks stereo, while Breakaway and Wildwood veer into extended metaphors on nature that feel digressive. That said, calling out societal ills in a literal sense isn’t always very effective either, as on Russia, which feels like a wasted opportunity to really stick the knife in.