Under the Pink

It's been a long time since an artist as quirky and defiantly personal as pianist-vocalist Tori Amos exploded upon the pop charts. With her debut effort LITTLE EARTHQUAKES, Amos avoided popular trends and convenient pigeonholes: all at once she evokes an era of thrush-like sopranos, folkish confessionals, and daring new wave artists. The resulting music on her second Atlantic release, UNDER THE PINK, is brimming over with innocence and sensuality, spirituality and heresy. That she is able to confront all of these contradictions, let alone try to resolve them, makes for remarkably powerful music.

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It's been a long time since an artist as quirky and defiantly personal as pianist-vocalist Tori Amos exploded upon the pop charts. With her debut effort LITTLE EARTHQUAKES, Amos avoided popular trends and convenient pigeonholes: all at once she evokes an era of thrush-like sopranos, folkish confessionals, and daring new wave artists. The resulting music on her second Atlantic release, UNDER THE PINK, is brimming over with innocence and sensuality, spirituality and heresy. That she is able to confront all of these contradictions, let alone try to resolve them, makes for remarkably powerful music.
In fact, UNDER THE PINK owes much of its potency to the feeling that we're watching Amos grow up before our very eyes. The daughter of a Methodist preacher, Tori Amos was a child prodigy on the piano, gifted with an exceptionally quick ear and a solid rhythmic feel. However, while pursuing her formal studies, she ran dead up against the rigidity of classical protocol, and her teachers tried to break her rather than channel her talents. Some of the emotional push and pull of this early artistic catharsis peeps through in the way Amos and co-producer Eric Rosse approach the multiplicity of piano sounds which inhabit UNDER THE PINK--sounds which symbolise the many feminine rites of passage depicted throughout the album.
There are the child-like, half-remembered musings of "Bells For Her" and "Icicle" ("I think the good book is missing some pages"), and the vigorous attack of "The Waitress", "Cornflake Girl" and "God" ("God sometimes you just don't come through/Do you need a woman to look after you"). Here Amos' sense of alienation, rage and betrayal is echoed in offbeat rock textures and swooping vocal refrains suggesting the work of fellow traveller Kate Bush on THE DREAMING. Elsewhere, her vibrant vocal range and lush harmonies suggest early Joni Mitchell and even the ethnic-new age melange of Enya. The characters in her songs, however, are neither flower children nor navel gazers, but strong, vulnerable women coming to terms with their needs and longings in an often chilly world. UNDER THE PINK maps the inner journey of post-modern women and signals the arrival of a singular new singer-songwriter.

Rolling Stone (5/13/99, p.54)
- Included in Rolling Stone's "Essential Recordings of the 90's."

Village Voice (3/94, p.5)
- Ranked #2 in the Village Voice's 1993 Pazz & Jop Critics Poll.

Rolling Stone (2/24/94, p.59)
- 3 1/2 Stars - Good Plus - "...The album is focused, the lyrics quirky and personable, the melodies eccentric enough to entice and simple enough to be catchy. These qualities--and her emotional fearlessness--make Tori Amos a musical find to treasure...."

Musician (2/94, p.71)
- "...Hardly in the last 20 years has any artist of any real nerve conspired to create an album quite so edgily designed around pianoforte and sotto voce as [UNDER THE PINK]....throwing in a sensationalist lyric or weird chord change that suddenly incarnates the emotional undercurrent of the song as it removes it from easy mainstream listening...."

NME (2/5/94, p.40)
- 6 - Good.