National female vocalist

Tori Amos

Choirgirl in space

The bulk of Tori's music has dramatized the internal, negotiating crises of faith and unpacking religious baggage with (largely) oblique imagery and Zep-schooled piano thunder. But From the Choirgirl Hotel (Atlantic) followed a marriage and a miscarriage, and Tori sounds equally freaked out by both, frightened and grounded and galvanized by external turmoil. It's somehow Amos-appropriate that all this upheaval produced a song like "Jackie's Strength." It's the most gorgeously lucid thing she's written in years, a home movie about loss and memory starring Jackie Kennedy and David Cassidy, with an accompanying video that played out like a tender Alice Hoffman story. The rest of Choirgirl sparks Tori's songs, profitably, with trip-hop affectations and the gravity of a full band; Tori even finds time to raise the oral-sex-metaphor ante established by 1996's "Professional Widow," telling some boy to swirl her raspberry like she's Foxy Brown laying down the law. You go, spacegirl.

-- Alex Pappademas

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Atlantic Records's Tori Amos page
A Tori Amos fan page
Another Tori Amos fan page

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