Tori Amos • Gold Dust

Deutsche Grammophon | October 1, 2012 | iTunes | Amazon | 7digital

8/10• Flavor
• Yes, Anastasia
• Jackie’s Strength
• Cloud On My Tongue
• Precious Things
• Gold Dust
• Star Of Wonder
• Winter
• Flying Dutchman
• Programmable Soda
• Snow Cherries From France
• Marianne
• Silent All These Years
• Girl Disappearing Two decades on from the groundbreaking Little Earthquakes, many of us probably think we know what to expect from Tori Amos – that is to say, the unexpected. More likely than not something bafflingly sprawling, with as many seconds of music as can be squeezed onto a compact disc. All of which makes the simplicity and familiarity of Gold Dust rather surprising. Amos’s usual penchant for outta-nowhere curveballs (like American Doll Posse‘s ludicrous ‘Fat Slut’ or the offensively abysmal ‘Police Me’ from Abnormally Attracted To Sin) simply doesn’t rear its head on this record, which reunites Amos with the Netherlands’ Metropole Orkest and conductor Jules Buckley – following their one-off live collaboration in Amsterdam two years ago – for an orchestral reimagining of fourteen songs that trace the full swoop of her post-Y Kant Tori Read career.

Amos has never shied away from dramatically reworking her songs. Indeed, her continued popularity as a live performer is at least partly owed to the fact that she seldom plays the same song the same way from night to night, let alone from tour to tour. For Gold Dust, she and longtime collaborator John Philip Shenale have taken a gentler approach, with many of the arrangements being largely unaltered. It’s rather telling that the most drastic alteration on Gold Dust (‘Yes, Anastasia’) is more notable for what it leaves out than for what it adds, excising the slow build of the 1994 original to allow Buckley and his charges to get straight into the juicy grand finale.

More often than not, the changes wrought on Amos’s back catalogue affect the tone of the songs rather than their structure. The opening ‘Flavor’ has by necessity lost its cool, synthetic edge, while ‘Precious Things’ has, in some ways, grown even more strident, the orchestral backing lending the chorus the righteous fury of an avenging angel. It is a wiser woman who sings this version of ‘Silent All These Years’, casting the song as an age-old story whose sting of sadness has faded into mere remembrance. ‘Snow Cherries From France’ has also gained a calmer, grown-up flavour in the nine years since its Tales Of A Librarian debut.

In many ways, it is that feeling of maturing that characterises Gold Dust. This is an older Tori Amos, looking back on her career from a hard-won place of calm. The Metropole Orkest deepens and enhances the tracks – which are all well chosen for the collaborative sound – rather than attacking their structure from the outside. Still, Amos can’t help but divide opinion whatever she does, and those fans looking for a radical new take on a favourite are likely to feel a bit cheated. Also, this album demands some quality equipment to fully enjoy; it’s quite possible to mistake a few of the more faithful tracks for the original recordings if listening on headphones while trotting down a busy street. Amos may have missed an easy win by not recasting Little Earthquakes as a whole with the same sort of treatment, but as a way to mark that album’s twentieth birthday in style and sophistication, Gold Dust makes for a very fine place to start.