How can you possibly fight the global dominance of the USA’s tech billionaires? As they continue to sink their obscene fortunes into artificial intelligence and other tools of domination, it seems nobody knows what’s real any more. So why not take up the language of fantasy and meet them on their own Tolkien-fixated terms?
That’s what beloved singer-songwriter Tori Amos is setting out to do on her new concept album In Times of Dragons. On opening track ‘Shush’, she quotes her character’s ‘sadistic billionaire Lizard Demon husband’ over somnolent, thudding beats: ‘I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.’
In the real world, this statement stands as the guiding principle of the far-right Dark Enlightenment movement, which underpins contemporary forms of evil from Trump’s nationalist monarchism to Silicon Valley’s reckless, relentless accelerationism. And if those who thirst for power know one thing, it’s that identifying something gives you a measure of control over it.
Indeed, Amos calls the Dark Enlightenment by name on the title track, examining its vicious nihilism with calm, clear eyes while organ notes fall like droplets of water. It comes off as not so much a call to arms as a stone-still rockpool in the midst of a storm.
But if you’re telling an adventure story, you’d better have an adventurous spirit to match, and both musically and lyrically Amos has never lost her searching soul. The panoramic ‘Provincetown’ might move at a restrained pace, but as Amos spiels through a list of mythical characters helping the album’s heroine on her flight across America, its fizzing harpsichordy tones and melodic bass-guitar yawns step in groovy tandem until you can feel the earth scrolling beneath her feet.
You don’t need to share Amos’s chromesthesia (she experiences music as colour and light) to get a sense of the rainbow-hued spell which ‘Gasoline Girls’ casts. With the jazzy melody flickering up and down as if it’s trying to jump off the piano, trying to follow its breathtaking leaps and dives feels like trying to catch a stream between your fingers.
Showcasing her undimmed piano skills just as cheerfully, music hall knees-up ‘Fanny Faudrey’ reminds us with a jolt that this is the same Tori Amos who twice covered Chas & Dave. As she rattles off a rollicking tale of escape sweetened further by singalong-ready backing vocals, it’s hard to resist joining in. And if the record wasn’t eclectic enough, the wriggling funk of ‘Pyrite’ and the secluded trip hop of ‘Blue Lotus’ prove there’s something for everyone here.
All the same, Amos never loses sight of her mission statement, and on ‘Ode to Minnesota’ she breaks from the worldbuilding to make a brief but wrought-iron gesture of solidarity. She knows as well as anyone that the only way to defeat isolation is through connection, with the record taking on a particularly intimate air whenever she duets with her daughter Tash. ‘Can a gift be born out of poison?’ they ask plaintively, voices soaring up in frittering harmony, over the squirming piano of ‘Veins’. Never mind the Anglo-German pun – any mother who has had a child by a tyrant will recognise the pain of that question.
‘Strawberry Moon’ is another remarkably tender mother-and-daughter duet, the instrumentation slowly growing beneath a spare exoskeleton of piano as the catch of passion in Amos’s voice reaches up towards her daughter’s incantatory repetition of the title. She’s been compared to Kate Bush more times than anyone can count, but in the sleekly weeping, almost classical bass that surfaces again and again throughout In Times of Dragons, the ghost of The Ninth Wave – the enchanting prog-pop suite which makes up Hounds of Love’s second side – feels particularly present.
But on synth-pop hymn ‘St. Teresa’, her production is less redolent of Kate Bush than it is of her collaborator Peter Gabriel. Individual notes of piano, guitar, synthesiser, and percussion are set flying free over a rumbling savannah-sized setting while she repeats the lyrics as if praying to herself, her voice growing ragged at the edges with breathy intensity.
Amos is the daughter of a Methodist minister, and with some of her most enduring songs (the angst-tastic ‘Crucify’, the jauntily dissonant ‘God’) dealing with religion, ‘St. Teresa’ is not the only track on this record to call on a saint. A plea to St. Cecilia, ‘Tempest’ affirms the power of music as a feminist force with the repeated refrain taking on the texture of a liturgy over its lavishly neoclassical backdrop.
And yet, when In Times of Dragons has answers to offer, it finds them not in God but in humanity. ‘Song of Sorrow’ is a grandly orchestral ballad about the weight of grief and the catharsis of sharing it, with the plain and heartfelt feeling in Amos’s delivery and the dark notes of threat in the piano ensuring that it is always beautiful and never histrionic. But Amos is never sentimentally complacent about compassion, recognising its fragility in the face of self-interest and hatred. ‘We who choose love over greed,’ she sings on stark warning ‘Angelshark’, ‘we are becoming an endangered species’.
At seventeen tracks, In Times of Dragons is an epic of an album, and if you haven’t been keeping an eye on the track list it’s easy to assume ‘Stronger Together’ is its finale. Another affecting letter from mother to daughter, building to a gently joyous climax with no fantasy tropes in sight, it glows with optimism and leaves you feeling that the battle has been won.
But then ‘23 Peaks’ suggests that all may not be well forever. Layers on layers of glassy ambient synth redolent of Brian Eno’s most mournful work ring out over the top of a great natural hum, as if you’re listening to the Earth breathe. It would be affecting even as an instrumental, but now we find Amos, in a voice which suddenly sounds as though it has lived through an epoch of suffering, reckoning with the terrible possibility of becoming the very same creature she has tried to evade until the song and the album are at last swallowed by the huge hopeful glow of an organ.
Tyranny, Amos knows, is not something which can be shut off by the flick of a switch. In every philosophy and every person there is a door which leads to evil, but all of us have the power to keep the door closed and the darkness at bay. And, in times such as these, a work of art as accomplished, as beautiful, and as generous as In Times of Dragons is a very bright light indeed.
In Times of Dragons is out now via Universal/Fontana – order here
Tori Amos is currently on tour in Europe – buy tickets here:
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Review by Poppy Bristow
Photography by Kasia Wozniak
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