Little Earthquakes

Tori Amos is coming, and if the English music press are to be believed, she's going to be huge. Bigger than Christ. Bigger than Tracy Chapman even…

Hailing from Canada, home of Mary Margaret O'Hara and Joni Mitchell (two appropriate reference points), Tori Amos pleads on the album's opener, 'Crucify', that she's "got enough guilt to start my own religion" – and by album's end you tend to agree with her.

Amos is happy not so much simply doing her dirty laundry in public as a parading boldly around the town in it. She both rejects and craves a love that she's chased and dodged at once since childhood, and she's not about to fall, wide-eyed, into the arms of the first man that manages to make her feel good. "So you can make me cum/That doesn't make you Jesus", she snarls on 'Precious Things', proclaiming that she wants to "smash the faces of those beautiful boys, those Christian boys".

Tori Amos wants to take the fear and domination out of sex without losing the mystery of the excitement. In 'Leather' she vexes "I'm standing naked before you/Don't you want more than my sex/I can scream as loud as your last one/But I can't claim Innocence". Adding fuel to the fire of these burning questions, Tori is haunted by memories of her father and the childhood words of advice he'd give to her.

Meanwhile, on 'Mother', she remembers being advised to spread her wings (and nothing more). And as one song after another accumulates, it becomes apparent that Tori Amos is reflecting a level of guilt – and attendant hang-ups that would make Woody Allen and Martin Scorcese look like Pinky and Perky. This girl seriously needs to get happy!

The Song That Everybody's Talking About is 'Me And A Gun', a bare acapella account of a rape. 'Yes I wore a slinky red thing/Does that mean I should spread for you, your friends, your father, Mr. Ed" – Tori treats it all with an off-hand, defiant cynicism, her quiet anger making it all the more harrowing.

Little Earthquakes is no Blood On The Tracks, but it does capture a girl at the cusp of her volcano, echoing Sinéad O'Connor and Kate Bush as she strives to make sense of the contradictions of being a woman in times like these. Trouble is, Tori Amos often isn't sure whether she wants to be a wolf in sheep's clothing, or a sheep in wolves' clothing.