Day 77: All My Faith Lost – The Hours

This is more like it. I don’t know if I would have usually said that this “is more like it,” but in the proximity of the hugely boring The Heavy, I’m extremely saying that. Still, this is odd music to get excited about.

All My Faith Lost are a male/female Italian duo who do atmospheric, dramatic music that damn near necessitates some thesaurusizing (I’m going with ‘stygian’). And when I say they do atmospheric music, I mean they create an unflinching, unwavering atmosphere from the first track on. They do goth minus the graveyard and black latex bodice, solemnity with romance, music to watch a time-lapse of a rose wilting to. Their palette is limited, but it doesn’t feel limited — they get a lot of versatility out of a (gorgeously recorded) piano ringing in a creaky-wooden room, their voices bouncing in a reverb tank, and some keyboard string section presets. Their way with these synth strings makes for slowly rippling Bohren-esque noirscapes, as they tend to just drone an incomplete, tense couple of notes, seldom alternating, while the piano splashes in it.

It’d be easy for this combo to plod along, and at times it does. In writing a series of yearning, romantic lullabies (whose lyrics are frequently unintelligible and sound like a mother cooing to her napping baby)  they effectively lull you into the album and leave you puzzled at its end, wondering how many songs just went by, trying to remember whether you just heard anything and struggling to recall what you heard. On “House of Incest“, they exhibit this quality to lovely effect, as the song moves glacially along.

Great music to make out to, or to lay in a hammock to. However it is going in my head as some kind of dream or drunk, some chunk of time deleted from my memory that I cannot access and can only judge by hints of recollections in its periphery — remembering feeling warm, feeling touched, but seeing only blackness.

Day 47: Tori Amos – Little Earthquakes

I remember Tori Amos vividly from my childhood, not as an event but as a sort of texture, perhaps like a smell I encountered once or twice and don’t remember for its specific odor but for how vividly I remember encountering it. Perhaps comparing the album to an odor right off the bat is a bad move for a review that is meant generally to consist of praise.

What I mean is I still have this memory of hearing “Cornflake Girl” around the house a lot as a kid. And I remember it as being some elemental thing, that even as a kid I could tell had a striking liveliness to it — a real vitality. I used to love the song quite a bit. It was like if Joni Mitchell became completely unhinged and decided to make her music rock as hard as it could while still sounding like herself. And when I listen to “Cornflake Girl” now (technically cheating, as it’s not on the album) I’m still struck by how much power the song has in its every single second. It’s as if it is coming through some filter that amplifies not the sound level but the force. It’s truly heavy music, and it’s why I’ve remembered it throughout my whole life.

But that song’s not on here. Little Earthquakes is a lot less vivid from a production standpoint — the whole thing is less loud, and a bit more calm on the surface, but “Cornflake Girl” is in full-on furor from start to finish. Even when it cuts out to that tinkling piano and the smug vocal, it’s hardly calming down as much as it is taking a breath between mouthfuls of flesh. Little Earthquake finds Tori Amos a bit more reserved, sounding fully self-assured but as if she’s holding a lot back. The scary thing is that to listen to this album alone you’d think she was holding back absolutely nothing. “Silent All These Years” is a strong moment early on that sets the confessional tone, in a largely accusative piece built around lines like “Hey, but I don’t care/’Cause sometimes/I said sometimes I hear my voice/And it’s been here/Silent all these years.” She turns mad in this song, that nagging piano line growling during the chorus where her voice explores the texture of the ceiling in the room.

“Crucify” begins on my favorite note of the album, possibly: that note that the song pushes itself off with is as bitter a sigh as I’ve heard a song make. This ends up being the album’s leitmotif. But Amos was not content to leave songs that quiet. “Precious Things” is where it takes off, its choruses popping with thunderclaps of drums and a desperately insistent piano line. “Winter” steps back to ballad mode, and shows Amos at her most theatrical. It sounds like it could be a piece from a musical, with its tempered orchestration and its vivid lyrical narrative. It’s a real show-stopper, and it appears before the album’s halfway point.

Not one review I’ve found of this album has been able to resist mentioning the penultimate song, “Me And A Gun“, and it’s not hard to see why. Even forgetting the haunting lyrical content (being a spine-shimmyingly frank and unsettling tale of Amos’ rape), the track points out, for anyone who hadn’t noticed, why the rest of the album worked: because even when you take away all the truly epic orchestration around the sounds and clamp Tori’s piano conduits behind her back, she can brandish an irrepressible emotional force that charges the air around everything she does.