Night of Hunters

Tori Amos doesn’t release albums these days, she puts out musical concept cycles where individual tunes often feel sublimated to the demands of the grandiose narrative spanning overhead. Sometimes the results are sublime – 2002’s Scarlet’s Walk, for instance, was the most cogent of the era’s post 9/11 ruminations whilst 2007’s American Doll Posse was a devastating evisceration of Bush-era America. Even her weaker efforts, such as 2009’s prog-slathered Abnormally Attracted To Sin, contains moments of gold-dust ( ‘500 Miles’ was a piano galloper that would have slotted comfortably into Boys For Pele or Under The Pink).
You fear, however, that she may have tried to salmon-leap a bit too high with her latest endeavour, a mystical narrative inspired by Irish mythology (the setting is the banks of the Bandon near Kinsale) and featuring Amos’ interpretations of the work of composers such as Bach, Debussy and Brahms.

Recording without her regular band for the first time in 15 years, Amos stitches songs together from brittle fragments of string and woodwind, her piano playing generally relegated to the backdrop. Opener ‘Shattering Sea’ has a bare boned power and Amos’ duets with daughter Natasha (playing a shape-shifting fox named Anabelle) pulse with a genuine eeriness. However, the record’s longueurs too often find Amos vanishing down a whirlpool of under-realised ambition. “It’s not a democracy. You cannot make a career choice by committee,” Amos told this writer recently. You admire her determination not to dance to anyone else’s reel. But even her most ardent fans may find Night Of Hunters a musical step too far.