Shifting the faultlines5 Out of 5 Stars
Say what you will about Tori Amos, her second album bent music in a new direction. Once "Little Earthquakes" opened a whole new audience of sensitive women who liked their music heavy on mystic and or religious imagery, devoid of bombast and just speaking to a crowd that was being ignored, Tori Amos found that crack and made it her very own Teutonic plate. There's good reason for that. "Little Earthquakes" sounded like little else out at the time (bear in mind, this was the year of Nirvana) and. other than Kate Bush, no other woman was bending traditional pop structures at will.
It makes Tori an anomaly. "Silent All These Years" missed the top 40, bit she's hit the top 5 albums constantly. She rarely uses electric guitars, "Crucify" starts the album with piano and drums only. Tori;s voice was often the most electrifying here, breaking from whispers and panting into tortured wails, then back again, like "Precious Things." (Which contains one of the most brutal put-downs of all-time in "So you can make me cum? That doesn't make you Jesus.") The painful alliance between womanhood and Christendom is a reoccurring theme on "Little Earthquakes," and Tori's "faeries" clung to it because they all understood where a riposte like "what's so special about really deep thoughts? You better hope I bleed real soon, how's that thought for you?" could spring from.
It's why "Little Earthquakes" meets one of my main standards of 5 star/classic albums. Tori successfully leapt from Glam/Goth Gal on "Y Kant Tori Read" to a knowing singer/songwriter the likes we hadn't seen since Carole King. She has artistically outgrown that label a long time back, but "Little Earthquakes" made young adult women realize that there was a place for them in music that didn't have to be Nine Inch Nails or Phil Collins.
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