Send "Tori Amos " Ringtones to your Cell 
| Popmatters |
 Having flirted with classical music forms at various points in her 20-year recording career, Tori Amos has finally committed in full. On Night of Hunters, her 12th studio album and, notably, first for Deutsche Grammophon, the Peabody Conservatory prodigy draws on four centuries of European art music (Bach, Schubert, Chopin, Satie, among others), as well as on popular balladry and elements of contemporary musical theater, to create a song cycle by turns intricate and impressionistic, demanding and enchanting. There are no guitars on the album and, save for Amos’s signature Bösendorfer, no percussion instruments. Instead, the album’s 14 songs are arranged for piano, strings, woodwinds, and voice. Doubtless, it is the first and the last of these—Amos’s piano and her voice, more exquisite here than ever—onto which most listeners will immediately fasten.They will have to hold on tight. Amos has always been proudly uncompromising in the articulation of her ever-evolving musical and lyrical visions, and it is hard not to applaud, even marvel at, Night of Hunters’ intense focus, meticulous craftsmanship, and bravura performances, not to mention its sheer artistic ambition. But with a running time of 72 minutes—and let’s remember that this is a song cycle, meant to be consumed in a single sitting—this predominantly slow, somber album ultimately overstays its welcome. No less wearying (especially for those who don’t already identify as “Toriphiles”) is Amos’s determination to translate deeply personal emotions and experiences into the elliptical, and often obfuscatory, language of New Agey narrative, self-conjured pseudo-ancient mythology, and neo-pagan nature personification. Little wonder, then, that the publicity materials include a track-by-track introduction penned by Amos herself. Oddly, and tellingly, however, such extra-musical, extra-commercial annotation serves only to make Night of Hunters’ story and characters seem more, not less, distant and incoherent....full text |
| Guardian |
| Another Tori Amos album, another overarching concept – which elicits trepidation these days, given that, for the last decade, her material has creaked beneath laboured over-explanations in lieu of the thrillingly cryptic bewilderment she had the confidence to trade on in her artistic prime. Thankfully, her "classical song cycle" necessitates sonic ambition as well: that Amos can weave her own songs so deftly into variations on classical pieces is testament to her talent, and the piano/strings/woodwind arrangements of Night of Hunters frequently sound as lovely as earlier orchestral experiments such as Yes, Anastasia. The heart-pounding drama of opener Shattering Sea even nears that career highlight's intensity. But the album's narrative – Celtic whimsy meets marriage counselling – is overthought, often dragging Amos's lyrics into cringeworthy territory, and the bulk of it is given over to resolution rather than build-up. Amos herself performs with an insistently flat calmness: when her 11-year-old daughter Natashya pops up on a few tracks, in character as a shape-shifting fox, she actually proves an odder, witchier, more compelling voice than her mother, who could be mistaken for her piano teacher....full text |
| Slantmagazine |
| Tori Amos in full-on concept-album mode is a dodgy proposition. Boys for Pele is perhaps the most purposefully dense album in her catalogue, and the better tracks on American Doll Posse were enhanced by her adoption of various personae. But Amos's post-feminist covers record, Strange Little Girls, was a didactic exercise in gender politics, and The Beekeeper's unique structure couldn't mask how dull and plodding Amos's songwriting was. Night of Hunters falls neatly at the halfway point between those two extremes: Its inspirations from specific classical pieces are on point, but the album's arrangements are just too consistently somnolent to inspire the level of active engagement that the record's narrative arc merits and rewards. That Night of Hunters isn't billed as a proper pop record—it's being released by the classical label Deutsche Grammophon—works in Amos's favor, in that she isn't hamstrung by her predilection for deliberate, calculated inaccessibility. Broadly, the record reveals a single, linear narrative of a woman who experiences a fever dream after having been left alone by her lover, and the various mythical figures she encounters in this dream state reveal to her how the roles of a hunter and the prey both define romantic relationships. It's a story with the protracted scope of an opera, and it's to Amos's credit that some of her more twee flights of fancy don't detract from the overall journey of the unnamed protagonist she's created. As is the case with most of Amos's output since her last unequivocally great album, From the Choirgirl Hotel, the exact details are what occasionally mar her songwriting here. "Battle of Trees" takes a turn for the ludicrous when Amos sings to her lover, "No one had more sharper consonants than you, love," speaking to the idea of language as a battle-ready weapon, but also singing the line like it's meant to be a come-on. The imagery from "Star Whisperer" recalls the worst fantasy fiction ("Will your cloud-riders come?/Why, oh why, have you locked up your sky?"), while the more awkward lines of "Job's Coffin" ("There is a grid of disempowerment/Our forces are being called to dismantle this") stumble over forced rhymes and some of Amos's idiosyncratic syntax. The more direct songs on Night of Hunters are genuinely beautiful and transcend the trappings of the album's rigid construct. "Nautical Twilight" marks a key turn in the album's narrative, but it also works as a standalone song of rediscovering one's identity following a difficult breakup: "I turned my back/On the force of which I am made/I abandoned it/Rupturing a delicate balance/When I left my world for his." The tension in opener "Shattering Sea," as Amos observes, "That is not my blood on the bedroom floor," both establishes context for the album's greater arcs and serves as a compelling mood piece on its own....full text |
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