Tori Amos – Tales Of A Librarian
Really more of a contractual obligation than anything, Tales Of A Librarian brings Tori Amos’ contract with Atlantic Records to an end and provides the fans with her first official best-of compilation. As with so many greatest hits collections, the main critique is going to be in the selection of material, though in most cases Librarian gives you what you’d expect; there’s a heavy emphasis on Little Earthquakes, represented by “Tear In Your Hand”, “Me And A Gun”, “Winter”, “Crucify”, “Precious Things” and “Silent All These Years”. Under The Pink is represented by “God”, “Cornflake Girl” and “Baker Baker”, while “Professional Widow” (wildly reworked; see below), “Way Down” and “Mr. Zebra” are here from Boys For Pele (what, no “Caught A Lite Sneeze”?).
There’s a surprising omission in the selection of songs from from the choirgirl hotel as well, as “Raspberry Swirl” is nowhere to be found; that album’s selection instead consists of “Spark”, “Jackie’s Strength”, and a version of “Playboy Mommy” that I’d swear has been, if not re-recorded, then at least heavily remixed. (All of the songs have been subtly reworked at least a little bit, but this is the most extreme example of that.) Perhaps not surprisingly, Strange Little Girls doesn’t make a showing at all, while only “Bliss” is drawn from the double album To Venus And Back.
The early era of Tori’s career – in some ways her most creatively energized years – is also represented by the Little Earthquakes-era B-sides “Mary” and “Sweet Dreams”, though they aren’t the original recordings.
“Mary” and “Sweet Dreams” were both re-recorded from the ground up for this album, and both of them receive a somewhat more raw, stripped-down treatment than their original versions. “Sweet Dreams” was always a bit of a jaunty, rollicking little number, with Tori backed up by the Subdudes, only here it’s arranged a little more loosely (though still with a full band backing), perhaps a little more representative of how it would sound today played live. It’s also shifted down a couple of keys, losing some of the original’s soaring backing vocals in the chorus. “Mary” has undergone an even more striking change, though – it’s gone from the traditional Little Earthquakes-style piano solo to a laid-back full-band arrangement similar to “Sweet Dreams”. And while I prefer the originals of both songs, these new arrangements aren’t bad. Just different. I’ve actually grown to like this alternative reading of “Mary” quite a bit.
Completely new on Librarian are “Angels” and “Snow Cherries From France”, which of course follow the same style as the rearranged B-sides: laid-back, with a small band, something that wouldn’t have been out of place on Scarlet’s Walk.
The whole re-recorded B-side thing bugs me a bit, because there’s something that would easily fulfill the contractual obligation and please the fans: Tori’s B-sides are a goldmine of fantastic material (in fact, while I rarely review CD singles here, I made an exception for some of Tori’s early CD singles because they were actually better than some of the album tracks). Not only are they good material, but they’ve become fairly scarce on CD. Surely a best-of-B-sides collection is waiting to happen somewhere.
Similarly, the bonus DVD of live material, while nice, misses the boat too – for years, Tori’s fans have been waiting for a video compilation on DVD. At least half of the tracks on Librarian have music videos that are just begging for an official release, and they’re some of the best examples of that medium in the past 15 years. Atlantic has announced and then cancelled a Tori Amos music video DVD at least twice to date; 
perhaps Librarian could’ve been a simultaneous multimedia release with these same hits receiving a long-overdue DVD treatment.
As it is, though, Librarian is a nice chronicle of Tori Amos’ career, with some interesting tracks that span the gap between where she’s been and where she’s going next.
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- Precious Things (4:32)
- Angels (4:29)
- Silent All These Years (4:12)
- Cornflake Girl (5:08)
- Mary (4:44)
- God (3:56)
- Winter (5:45)
- Spark (4:15)
- Way Down (1:52)
- Professional Widow (3:50)
- Mr. Zebra (1:07)
- Crucify (5:02)
- Me And A Gun (3:45)
- Bliss (3:37)
- Playboy Mommy (4:08)
- Baker Baker (3:14)
- Tear In Your Hand (4:40)
- Sweet Dreams (3:41)
- Jackie’s Strength (4:27)
- Snow Cherries From France (2:56)
Released by: Atlantic
Release date: 2003
Total running time: 79:20
It seems like a lot of remix maestros have been bursting onto the scene as solo artists lately – Moby, BT, Fatboy Slim, you name it – but few of them have as unique a sound as Australian Rob Dougan sports on his debut album. Having put his unique spin on the works of a number of artists including Kylie Minogue, Dougan discovered a whole new unexpected audience when one of his songs was used very briefly in The Matrix. Remember the “lady in the red dress” training scene where Morpheus demonstrates the dangers of the Agents to Neo? The low-key atmospheric menace leading into that scene is a short excerpt from Dougan’s “Clubbed To Death” single. When The Matrix exposed Dougan’s song to not just a new audience or two, but rabid new audiences, he wisely repeated the move by reworking another of his songs for the soundtrack of The Matrix Reloaded.
longer than it is. And it proves, as does the rest of Furious Angels, one thing: Dougan is ready for a film scoring assignment of his own, not just riding shotgun with Don Davis. Hopefully someone who’s actually making a movie will pick up this hint too and put Dougan on the case, because I’m ready for more where this came from.
It’s been far too long since Weird Al graced us with his presence on record, though I have a theory as to why this isn’t his fault. I’ll get back to that in a moment though.
The first in a promised trilogy of short EPs of songs-in-progress, Ben Folds’ Speed Graphic sits nicely alongside the equally-cryptically-titled Sunny 16 as a sample of what might be on the way – again, there’s no guarantee that any of these tunes will make it to Folds’ next album.
Ben Folds is back, but you can be forgiven for missing the fanfare, because there hasn’t been much of it – this isn’t a typical major label release. As a warm-up to his next solo album, Folds has been trying out some works-in-progress on listeners through a series of EPs released only into the Japanese market (though you can order them from the links below). Folds has said that there’ll be a trio of these short releases, and some of the songs may appear on his next release on Sony, but some of them won’t – so once again, it’s interesting that we’re essentially listening to someone’s demos. But what demos!
It’s kinda sad, really, that in a careful listen to all of the Matrix franchise soundtracks post-dating the original movie, the biggest revelation turns out to be the quietly-released Animatrix soundtrack. Released along with the DVD in some deluxe packages and released on its own with almost no fanfare, the Animatrix CD contains the music from which the cues used in that collection of nine animated shorts was derived. Now, there’s no doubt that Don Davis is the sound of The Matrix saga for long-form feature films. But I listened to the soundtracks from Animatrix and The Matrix Revolutions back-to-back, and Animatrix is the one that begged for repeat play. In some ways, it’s almost unfair competition: Animatrix had such a wild variety of settings and environments, each crying out for their own unique sounds, that it’d be hard for a movie to keep up. But in that respect, it also resembles the original Matrix more – because wasn’t that movie’s music also a daringly diverse and yet paradoxically cohesive whole?
It’s not too often that I’m going to waltz in here and brag about the packaging of a CD, since it’s so frequently tangential to the contents of said CD, but given this disc’s retro-video game theme, it has the coolest possible case: the disc is black on both sides, and comes in a soft-lined floppy disk sleeve cut open at the top. The floppy sleeve comes in the traditional paper envelope, and by God, it looks like a 5 1/4″ floppy.
Me First And The Gimme Gimmes don’t release their albums often enough for me. And this is one of their best ones yet. For those who haven’t heard me wax rhapsodic about the Gimmes before, they’re an all-star aggregation of members from other punk bands such as NOFX who gather to deliver a vicious kidney punch to much-deserving radio staples from the 60s, 70s and 80s – and it seems like the latter era is where Take A Break gets its inspiration. The Gimmes once again ride the volume, and their musical skills, up to “11” on the knob, proving that they can actually sing and they can actually play. Something else they can do is be funny as hell, as proven by the masterful touch of adding the Three Stooges’ “hello, hello, hello… hello!” harmony gag to the tail end of Lionel Richie’s ballad “Hello” (a song I used to dread hearing on the radio, though I love this reading of it). Other targets include “Where Do Broken Hearts Go?”, Whitney Houston’s “Save The Best For Last”, and…it’s as if the guys read my mind and plucked out a perfect songlist of tunes with whom I’ve held a grudge for a decade and a half.
I first heard of R.E.M. when I heard “Stand” on the car radio during a snow day in eighth grade. When Out Of Time rolled around during my sophomore year in high school, the band became my favorite, and it hasn’t relinquished the title since. Many of their songs serve as the anchor points through which I can recall my life and how I lived it when I originally heard them. It’s no coincidence that this Best Of collection that covers the group’s time with Warner Bros. also parallels my awareness of their music – without the major-label push that got “Stand” and “Losing My Religion” on Top 40 radio, there’s no way this music would ever have reached my sheltered ears. I can only thank the heavens that it did.