Tori Amos - In Times Of Dragons
★★★★
UNIVERSAL/FONTANA
“I knew a girl who wrote Silent All These Years,” spits Tori Amos with startling venom, as Shush, the stentorian opener to her 18th album grinds to a close. “Where is she?” It’s a good question, since the Tori Amos who wrote Silent All These Years all those years ago is in her sixties now and there are those who still favour its parent album, 1992’s magical Little Earthquakes.
So, yes, a good question, but not an entirely fair one and Amos is clearly irked by it. She’s moved on of course, but by the closing 23 Peaks, she’s admitting, “I need your help to change me back/Back into the woman I want to be”.
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READ MORE: Tori Amos Interviewed: “In this album’s story, I’m married to a demon lizard-king billionaire.”
She remains a woman with a distinctive voice and an even more distinctive way with a Bösendorfer, but as she’s matured, she’s added layers of depth, experience and nuance without sacrificing her template. Kate Bush, Fiona Apple and Rufus Wainwright are obvious fellow travellers and St. Vincent an equally obvious acolyte, but Amos is clearly familiar with Dory Previn and Mary Margaret O’Hara too. Even so, In Times Of Dragons, a concept album of sorts, is Tori Amos at her most Tori Amos.
Time has significantly ripened and lowered her voice, but Amos still delivers beautifully and, as ever, that beauty enhances the anger which underpins almost everything she’s done. Among many others, Amos evokes Cecilia, the patron saint of musicians; the visionary 16th-century nun St Teresa Of Ávila and disenfranchised divinities such as the Roman sea goddess Salacia. Yet as well as those ancient muses and rabbit-holes of mythology she delights in exploring, In Times Of Dragons is a contemporary parable for Trumpian times where a smorgasbord of characters react to democracy being subsumed by tyranny as a wife flees her abusive husband. Like its closest Amos siblings, Scarlet’s Walk (2002) and American Doll Posse (2007), it’s far from immediate, but the delayed gratification reaps rewards aplenty.
The title track speaks of “the lizard demon and his sadistic companions”, while Stronger Together, written with and featuring her law student daughter Tash, details a mother/daughter bond. Elsewhere, the escapee of Gasoline Girls recovers from being “stalked by henchmen of that lizard scum”, but “ICE breathes in fire’s wind” in the brief, spartan but very 2026 Ode To Minnesota. It’s all over the place and it’s stronger for it.
To answer Amos’s own question, where is the girl who wrote Silent All These Years? She’s still there, older and wiser, and broken but buoyant, especially on the pounding, claustrophobic Tempest, where the cortisol-energised narrator escapes vague but dire threat. She’s there too on the deceptively jaunty Fanny Faudrey and on Provincetown, where a gay witch conjures up an especially annoying spirit guide. That girl never really went away.
In Times Of Dragons is out May 1 on Universal/Fontana.
ORDER: Amazon | Rough Trade | HMV
Tracklisting:
Shush
In Times Of Dragons
Provincetown
St. Teresa
Gasoline Girls
Ode To Minnesota
Fanny Faudrey
Veins
Strawberry Moon
Song Of Sorrow
Flood
Pyrite
Tempest
Angelshark
Blue Lotus
Stronger Together
23 Peaks
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