Live Report: Tori Amos At 3Olympia Theatre, Dublin

There’s a moment towards the end of Tori Amos’ first Dublin show in five years when the performance suddenly takes to the sky. Amos, dressed in cloud blue, red hair whipping back and forth, slams the board above her piano keys with a sinewy thwack. The note sustains. Whoops ring out. For everyone in the room – perhaps even Amos itself – it’s feels like forever since we’ve experienced something like it.

It is almost too perfect that this stratospheric outburst occurs during a track literally called ’Take to the Sky’, originally recorded down the road in Delgany, County Wicklow during the sessions for her third LP Boys for Pele. Widely misunderstood on release, it was only in later decades the album received its due. Today it regarded as a piano-prog masterpiece and arguably the purest expression of Amos’s uniquely baroque songwriting.

Pele marked its 25th anniversary last year. Meanwhile, her 1992 debut, Little Earthquakes, turned 30 in January (a commemorative graphic novel is on the way). With those red-letter dates potentially in mind, Amos sprinkles in many glittering highlights. ‘Crucify’, from Little Earthquakes, is slowed to a swampy crawl before a chorus that drives nails through the lyrics (“just what God needs, one more victim”). And from Pele, ‘Little Amsterdam’ delivers a teasing southern Gothic pastiche, as if Kate Bush were possessed by the unquiet spirit of William Faulkner (“Momma it wasn't my bullet”).

Amos’s latest album, Ocean to Ocean, is a wintry, wind-whipped delight. A record forged in the white heat of grief following the death of her mother, it was a catalysing moment for the American, the muscularity of the material recalling the strung-out melancholy of the grunge-era laments with which she conquered pop in the early ’90s.

It’s a sign of the record’s quality – how it cast off the slough that descended on Amos’s writing in the previous decade – that four new numbers hold their own alongside the favourites for which the audience has come. The title track spins a briny tale of lockdown angst, as Amos gazes out at the ocean in her home in Cornwall and wonders about friends back in America. And on ‘Spies’, Amos name-checks Dublin (cheer) and Skibbereen (louder cheer, weirdly).

Ukraine casts a shadow. The backing lights project blue and gold before the show. Later, Amos reveals she received a request from a Ukrainian living in Dublin who has a family member fleeing the war and has been listening to Tori’s ‘Indian Summer’ to get her through. The song is swoons and soars, conveying heartache but hope, too (ironically, or perhaps appropriately, it is from her 2010 record Live In Moscow).

Amos would never do anything as crass as play a greatest hits concert. She does, however, reach for cult favourite ‘Black Dove’, the open-veined piano ballad equivalent of a Wagner opera that segues from understatement to thumping grandeur. And she weaves through her 1994 “smash” ‘Cornflake Girl’, a portal fantasy dirge powered by a turbo-charged uncanniness. “London and Cork were great but that was better,” says an uber-fan who has followed her through the tour. “That was the best one yet.”