Tori Amos: Night of Hunters – Review

photos: Victor de Mello

Wow. I am sitting here still speachless after hearing the brand new Tori Amos record Night of Hunters that will be released through Deutsche Grammophon on September 16th 2011. With a cover so commercially looking I totally didn’t expect this. I think it’s the most impressive album she has done in a long time. Not that her other records are bad. I have love for every single one of them. But there are the ones that I love a little less such as The Beekeeper or Abnormally Attracted To Sin and the ones I love a little more like From The Choirgirl Hotel or Scarlett’s Walk. But Night of Hunters has quickly made it to the top of my list! Some more details of the album and more cheasy press photos after the jump.

I think old-school fans of Tori will be very happy with this album. Her recent records have been kind of too polished and “happy” for those who have fallen in love with her back in the 90s. But with the first few songs of Night of Hunters you will quickly realize that this has a completely different sound and feeling. Every track has a little orchestra in it, which is something Tori rarely uses in her music, and this gives the music a whole different magnitude.

The opening track Shattering Sea starts off quite dramatically with a lot of strings and woodwinds. I was instantly abducted into one of those big old paintings of a ship on a wild sea. In the second, quite melancholic track Snowblind you will hear the debut of Tori’s eleven year old daughter Tash. I was actually quite surprised by this, because I didn’t know about it before. You will hear her a couple of times on the record, and being the daughter of Tori Amos, it doesn’t come as a surprise that this girl can sing and her voice already has a lot of character.

The third song Battle of Trees is quite an epic one with its almost 9 minutes playtime. The plugged strings in the beginning create this almost unworldly atmosphere. I suddenly found myself in this quirky Tim Burtonesque underworld with strange trees and creatures.

The very light-hearted Your Ghost is exactly the kind of tune I would imagine when reading an old fairytale book. The following track Edge Of The Moon starts in the same style, but in its second act it bursts out in a way that reminds me a lot of very early songs of Tori which makes this my favorite of the album.

Seven Sisters is an extremely beautiful instrumental track that features  Andreas Ottensamer,  principal clarinetist for the Berliner Philharmoniker. The last track Carry is one of those magnificent grand finales, just like Scarlet’s Walk’s Gold Dust. When it ended I was sitting there with goosebumps all over…

“I have used the structure of a classical song cycle to tell an ongoing, modern story. The protagonist is a woman who finds herself in the dying embers of a relationship. In the course of one night she goes through an initiation of sorts that leads her to reinvent herself allowing the listener to follow her on a journey to explore complex musical and emotional subject matter. One of the main themes explored on this album is the hunter and the hunted and how both exist within us,” says Tori herself.

I can’t wait for the Berlin concert at Tempodrom on October 11, 2011. Get your ticket here.

www.toriamos.com

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<a href="https://www.iheartberlin.de/author/admin/" target="_self">Frank</a>

Frank

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