Greggy writes letters and burns his CDs

Continuing my trip back through the 1994 album charts.

13/02/94 : Under The Pink - Tori Amos

Our third visit with Tori and I've enjoyed our previous visits with her piano-based kookiness and I know this is a highly regarded album. This is also our third female singer/songwriter in a row - which is pretty good going for the time.

It opens with a track I knew, with "A Really Good Year" being a typical combination of musicality and quirk - it's got a lovely combination of piano and strings under it but it does take some trips out there in places. And I also obviously knew "Cornflake Girl" which has some most peculiar lyrics, but is very catchy musically. And that's a pretty common theme throughout the album, although I'd say there's less musical quirk than I was expecting - it features some absolutely gorgeous piano playing though. Overall, I'd say it's admirable rather than loveable on the first listen, but I can see it potentially being a grower.

We're at #2 in the charts this week on the second week of a fourteen week run with it having debuted at #1 - all of which was considerably more successful than I remembered it being. The rest of the top five were Enigma (a new entry), Mariah Carey, Garth Brooks (someone we have yet to meet - but we won't have to wait long) and Therapy? (another new entry) with the next highest new entry being a Roberta Flack best-of (#7).

Wikipedia tells us this is her second album and, despite a reasonable amount of text, has remarkably little content. The thing that jumped out at me most is that "Past The Mission" has Trent Reznor on backing vocals - they don't seem like an obvious combination. Critically, the reviews were generally positive although there were some complaints about the obscurity of the lyrics, with NME complaining it was like being "locked in a semantic castle". Commercially, it did pretty well globally even though here was the only country where it made it to #1 - it got to #12 in the US, selling two million copies over there.

discogs.com tells us you can pick up a decent version for £1.50 but you can get an unopened US import vinyl for £82.31 if you're desperate to throw some cash at it. This is the sort of album that if I'd bought it at the time, I might have listened to it loads and loved it (although I do prefer my lyrics to be slightly more accessible than these seem to be) - but it never got the chance, so it's going to go down as a "could be a grower, but we'll never find out" album. It really does have lovely piano work though!

06/02/94 - Better than I was expecting
20/02/94 - OK, but not for me