Boys for Pele

Tori Amos | Format: Audio Cassette

Product Details

• Audio Cassette (January 23, 1996)
• Number of Discs: 1
• Label: Atlantic / Wea
• ASIN: B000002J89
• Also Available in: Audio CD  |  Vinyl  |  MP3 Download
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (353 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #716,388 in Music (See Top 100 in Music)

Track Listings

1. Horses

2. Blood Roses

3. Father Lucifer

4. Professional Widow

5. Mr. Zebra

6. Marianne

7. Caught a Lite Sneeze

8. Muhammad My Friend

9. Hey Jupiter

10. Way Down

11. Little Amsterdam

12. Talula [The Tornado mix]

13. Not the Red Baron

14. Agent Orange

15. Doughnut Song

16. In the Springtime of His Voodoo

17. Putting the Damage On

18. Twinkle

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com

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. --Roni Sarig

Product Description

Limited edition of 1996 album with mixes of two album tracks, 'Professional Widow' (Armand's Star Trunk Funkin' Mix) & BT's 'Talula' (The Tornado Mix), replacing 'In The Springtime Of His Voodoo' and the original version of 'Talula'. 18 tracks total. EastWest release. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

54 of 58 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Into The Labyrinth, May 5, 2000

By 

J. E. Barnes - See all my reviews

This review is from: Boys for Pele (Audio CD)

With the hopeful words 'And if there's a way to find you, I will find you/For threads that are golden don't break easily,' from its brooding first song, 'Horses,' it is clear that, on Boys For Pele, Amos is off questing. There is an implied invitation to follow, but Amos is increasingly an artist's artist, her songs musically and lyrically hieroglyphical and untranslated. In the next song, 'Blood Roses,' one of the most visceral break-up ever songs committed to record, she confronts the Minotaur head on, and it becomes clear that the path she's on is the dark one leading into the labyrinth. Not an easy quest to take up, or follow down.

This album seethes with honest passion, ungainly, ugly, and destructive, in a more overt way than did the already aggressive Under The Pink (with its repetitive choruses of 'I want to kill this waitress/but I believe in peace, ...,' 'this can't be happening/you bet your life it is,' 'can't stop what's coming, can't stop what is on it's way,' the off-hand 'a few witches burning, gets a little toasty,' and the murderous 'Past The Mission')----in fact 'Professional Widow,' teeth bared, Medusa-head held high, scorches like nothing since Marianne Faithfull's Broken English. Since the album's title refers to men and boys sacrificed to the capricious Hawaiian goddess of the volcano, Tori's emotions (and untamed vocals throughout), as expressed, are appropriate. Loneliness, spiritual isolation, suicide, murder, death, masochism, and rapacity all make appearances, but, if one looks closely, only in passing: it is Amos's individualistic, spiritual striving that is the theme and real key to the record.

Fans and critics who accuse Amos of a direct and willful adversarial relationship with God (or 'God') are wrong. Amos's god-like or godly personae here---Pele, Lucifer, Mohammad, Jupiter----are living, vibrating metaphors with which she has opened and sustained a running, and, importantly, two-sided, dialogue. These fragile and suspicious exchanges, difficult if not impossible to understand literally, are shared here with the listener with all emotional blinders off, so even the most obtusely lyrical songs are understandable on an feeling level. Comparably, a person who doesn't understand Spanish or Latin dialects can still enjoy an album like Yma Sumac's Voice of Xtabay, whose meaning is all in Sumac's voice and intonation, or might as well be.

As the songs pass and fold brilliantly, chaotically, and wildly into one another, Tori herself, as a persona, becomes less and less apparent, as would might expect of someone harrowingly isolated. 'The way down,' she sings midway through the album's eighteen tracks, still descending, 'the way down, she knows.' At one point, on 'In The Springtime Of His Voodoo,' Amos finds herself not in her own composition but in the Eagles' 'Take It Easy' singing, "hey, I think I'm in the wrong song." Almost at the end, in the plainly masochistic 'Putting The Damage On,' which nonetheless has one of the Pele's loveliest melodies, we gain what might be direct, or only teasing, insight into the source of Amos's more pragmatic wounds: 'Boy, you sure look pretty/When you're putting the damage on.' Presuming she means he's putting the damage on her, feelings, acceptance and tolerance like that lead to pain, abuse, and self-hatred, there's no doubt.

Boys For Pele is a masterpiece and an incredibly brave work. Subsequently, Amos has withdrawn into strictly artificial personas, with very few exceptions. A far cry from the college girl-like Little Earthquakes, Boys For Pele will not appeal to the broad public. The photograph of Amos on the sleeve, guarding a primitive back-hills cabin with a shotgun, rattlesnakes around her feet, is interesting, as is the photo inside of Amos, in a rocking chair, nursing a piglet at her breast like an indiscriminate earth goddess, teat available to all in need. In another, the reflection of a nuclear family is visible in an oily puddle, as is an explosion, possibly a nuclear one: certainly this is a clever play of words, meaning and image. Shadowy children's faces peer through the dirty windows from the dark interior of the shack, suggesting abandonment, sorrow, and vulnerability, perhaps the way Amos felt as a child, or may have felt during the record's production.

However, the atmosphere of the record would be better represented by something like the photograph of Nico on the cover of her fourth solo album, The End, in which Nico, already half-sunk into her late decadent phase, naked at the shoulder, peers out pensively into an unknown and indiscernible gloom.

27 of 29 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Evil! Hardly!, January 20, 2000

By 

Michael Collins (Newfoundland, Canada) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Boys for Pele (Audio CD)

Its true that this is Amos's must challanging work. Only "Caught a Lite Sneeze" lacks depth, and its still a pretty difficult song. This is not for the lazy listener. It is my personal favorite Tori Amos album, but if you're new to her, buy Under the Pink, or From the Choirgirl Hotel, first.

I can understand why some people dislike this- the melodies are quite classical in style (and look how much mainstream popularity classical music has!), and Tori's unique voice does get a little whiney at times- notably on Professional Widow. However, each song, if you let it, will take up residence in your head or heart (or somewhere inbetween), and take on a special meaning to you. So very few artists can do this; its a magical thing.

As for the person who said, because of the song "Father Lucifer" (don't let the title scare you) that Tori Amos is, to paraphrase, 'sugar-coated evil', I seriously quesiton if he or she read the lyrics or listened to the song at all. "Father Lucifer" is a beautiful piano song about the dark side of human nature- not some satanic rant! If it's wrong to sing about humanity's dark side, well then it's a sad world! I prefer my music to be honest, thank you very much.

The synopsis? If you're a Tori fan, its a must have. If you find it too dense/annoying, just give it time to grow on you. If you don't know Tori Amos, this isn't the best place to start (although ti was my first Tori album). Save Pele for when you've become accustomed to Tori's delightful eccentricities!

20 of 22 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Great album ruined, February 27, 2003

By 

T. Mobbs - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Boys for Pele (Audio CD)

A 'special' version of a CD that is to be avoided at all costs. It was an attempt to cash in on the success of the remix of 'Professional Widow'. However anyone who bought this for the remix almost certainly hated the rest of the album, and anyone who bought the album as the whole would have hated having the remix slapped into the middle of it. The two styles (remix vs the rest) are so violently different it hurts.

If you want the album (and to me it rates 5 stars) get the regular version complete with 'In the Springtime of His Voodoo'. If you want the Professional Widow remix, buy the single. Just don't buy this triumph of commercial opportunism over musical taste.