tori amos - boys for pele

.:: Boys for Pele, the title of Tori Amos's epic third album, is as awkward and confusing as the music inside. Though it sounds like a recruitment slogan for Little League soccer, the name actually refers to the lost temples of feminine divinity. Pele, you see, is the Hawaiian volcano goddess; the boys, well, they're the sacrifices that quell the rumbling lady's rage.

Attempting to regain fires stolen long ago, Pele rewrites the crucifixion to star a girl Jesus and in doing so conjures a forgotten matriarchal mythology. While Amos's characters--Jupiter, Muhammad, Lucifer--are male by name, the aural landscape into which they're thrown is as symbolically and expressionistically female as Georgia O'Keeffe's skull-and-roses paintings.

Pele is a complex and formless--and often impenetrable--work of gothic-pop chamber music, both beautiful and ghostly in its nearly complete reliance on Amos's rolling Bosendorfer grand piano, chilling harpsichord (which she bangs like a courtly punk rocker), and acrobatic voice (as earthy as Joni Mitchell's and as otherworldly as Bjork's).

Unfortunately, she takes us only halfway: her songs engage and challenge us to understand, but the imagery offers few clues to help us crack their frustrating opacity. Pele ends up as much a pretentious and self-indulgent trip as it is a synthesis of talent, imagination, and skewed vision. Still, there's reason to celebrate that an album as formalistically and thematically alien to pop audiences as Pele would win such quick success upon its original release.


.:: All of the Boys For Pele album tracks were written by Tori, and for the first time, Tori produced the album herself. The tracks were recorded by Mark Hawley and Marcel Van Limbeek. Another addition to this album was Tori's use of some new keyboard varieties: a harpsichord, a harmonium organ, and a clavichord.

Boys For Pele also included church bells, horns, strings, a gospel choir and bagpipes. Steve Caton handled the guitars and would join Tori on the road for the Dew Drop Inn '96 Tour. Principal recording was done in a church in County Wicklow, Ireland; a rented house in County Cork, Ireland; with the remainder in New Orleans, LA USA. Future pressings of Boys For Pele would replace the original version of Talula with Talula (The Tornado Mix).

"Well, Pele is the volcano goddess and I thought of like, um, sacrificing some of the boys in my life to her but then I decided that that wasn't really a very good idea. And, the album is sort of about the way I've stolen fire from the men in my life. And I got tired of doing that 'cause I have my own. But I couldn't see that for a very long time. And now I can respect them without needing to suck their blood."
-- Tori; BBC Interview

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