posted 2007/04/30 at 15:57
These next couple of weeks are going to be kind of big for me, as Tori Amos releases a new album tomorrow, then Björk releases a new album the following Tuesday. I plan on picking both up on their release days, as usual, and I'm sure I'll enjoy both of them. I guess that over the years it's become almost a tradition for me to become hyperbolic in my assessments of the albums on here, encouraging all of you to buy five or ten or even twenty copies.
I have a confession to make, though. I think I've only ever listened to Tori Amos' most recent release, The Beekeeper, two or three times, and I'm positive I only ever listened to Björk's most recent album, Medulla, once before I shelved both of them. To be clear about this, it wasn't that I didn't like both albums or think they weren't very good. On the contrary, I thought they were both great. There was just something that prevented me from connecting to either of them like I'd connected to their previous works, though, and I just didn't really feel compelled to listen to them more than I did.
Part of me thinks that this is just a reaction to the way both Björk and Tori's styles have changed over the years. Björk pretty much reinvents herself with every new album she puts out, and Tori seems to go further and further away from her "girl and a piano" image with each passing year. In Björk's case, I think her mid-nineties work was her strongest -- I still believe Homogenic is the greatest album ever -- and I don't think Tori's yet been able to match the incredible intimacy of her first three albums, particularly Under the Pink. Although I could make cases for those albums being their strongest musically, part of me wonders if I just remember those albums better because of what stage of my life I was in when those albums first came out. I bought Under the Pink when I was 18 and I was going to Antioch and finally starting to feel comfortable about myself, and then Homogenic came out when I was 21 and starting to find some success with all the Website work I'd been doing for the past couple of years. (Homogenic also came out about the same time that Final Fantasy VII came out in the US, which may also be colouring my judgment of it.)
Another part of me wonders how much I have changed since then, though. When I started back at college my music choices changed a lot, now that I think about it. Back when I was mostly working on Websites all day I could get away with "noisier" music in the background, but once I was doing homework and writing papers and stuff, I found myself drawn back to the new age music I'd fallen in love with in my pre-teen years. (Yes, I'm odd, thanks for asking.) Even now that I've been out of school for a while, though, I still find myself much more drawn to playing Matsui Keiko and Catherine Marie Charlton than Björk or Tori, and I honestly don't know why that is. Perhaps these next two CDs I buy will change my listening habits here.
copyright © 2008 Sean Shannon