Under the Pink

TORI AMOS: Under the Pink (East West)

ROCK JOURNALISTS sometimes reveal themselves to be out and out pinheads. I’m thinking specifically now of the dumb-ass reviewer who wrote, of this album, that Tori Amos “sounds like she never got over the trauma of having to leave her mother’s nice, cosy womb and consequently spends most of her time grappling with modern-day demons that everybody else has learned to deal with”.

It isn’t being melodramatic to ask if the reviewer in question ever had to grapple with the trauma of being raped, an experience explored unflinchingly by Amos in her song, ‘Me And A Gun’, on her debut album, the staggeringly powerful Little Earthquakes. Not surprisingly, it also is an experience that fires the rage at the heart of many of the Tori Amos songs that deal with sexuality, though never as explicitly as on ‘Me And A Gun’.

So, no, to quote that reviewer again, there isn’t a “whole lot of hilarity” on Under the Pink. But then, nor is there much hilarity in the rapidly escalating war between men and women, which probably found its definitive moment the night that carving knife sliced into John Wayne Bobbitt’s penis. Yet if Amos is at the cutting edge of the same war, she also has the ability to transcend the normal battle lines. And she is not without humour.

In ‘The Waitress’, having admitted that she wants to kill an unpleasant co-worker who also happens to appeal more to the boys than she does, Tori asks “is all her power in her club sandwich?” It is a humorous, throwaway line which also has the unvarnished ring of honesty. And it suggests that Tori, as a woman obviously understands that feminism needs to rise above the ‘all-men-are-pricks/bastards’ ideology or at least to concede – in the same spirit – that many women can be “cunts”, offensive as the use of the word as a derogatory term quite clearly is.

Indeed, she claims she wrote her current Top 10 single, ‘Cornflake Girl’ to subvert the infantile notion that “women are the good guys and men the bad guys”. ‘Bells For Her’ also examines the distance between her own ever-evolving view on sexual politics and those women who insist on locking themselves inside a ‘victim’ mode, which she refuses to do – a quantum leap for a woman who was once raped.

But then a song like ‘Icicle’ – which celebrates masturbation – clearly highlights Tori’s belief that empowerment stems from taking control of your own sexuality, particularly as an act of defiance against the oppressive force of religion. Pushing the line further, in ‘God’ she takes a sideswipe at patriarchal power structures? “God, sometimes you just don’t come through/You need a woman to look after you”.

Sexual politics aside, songs like ‘Icicle’ also show that Tori Amos, like Randy Newman and Brecht/Weil, has mastered the art of placing frequently barbed lyrics in a voluptuous musical setting. The sweeping orchestrations are also matched by a similar dynamic in her voice and piano playing, which is seemingly instinctively understood by Tori’s co-producer, her boyfriend, Eric Rosse.

If the album has a flaw it is that some of the songs may seem hermetically sealed to a pop audience. Yet, as with the success of ‘Cornflake Girl’, heavily metaphorical lyrics can be carried by an overpowering sense that something is going on to which an audience can relate that goes beyond literal meaning. Besides, poetry is defined by its power to suggest rather than state.

Under the Pink, as another chapter in Tori Amos’s ongoing odyssey, is her Blood on the Tracks. When she claims that these songs come “from the womb rather than the head” she is not indulging in hyperbole.

P. J. Harvey, Bjork, Kristen Hersch , Tori Amos – one could easily conclude that the best songs being delivered these days are those that do come from the womb.

• Joe Jackson