Fridae

"Storytelling by the fire with music,
and how you take the stories from town to town,
and the stories shift because of what you heard about in the last town."
- Tori Amos describing the concept behind her new album.

Ms Scary's long-suffering partner has exclaimed on numerous occasions that there are few women on God's fair earth who can challenge yours truly in terms of sheer looniness. Yet, in Ms Scary's opinion, Tori Amos with her obscure poetic musings, conversations with angels, kooky personality and off-the-wall album concepts (please! she was once photographed breast-feeding a piglet for her 1996 album), takes the cake any day.

Belonging to a very select group of pop singers today that still adopts the piano as their musical instrument of choice, the flame-haired vixen has recently released her seventh album on Epic Records entitled Scarlet's Walk with long-time collaborators Jon Evans on bass and Matt Chamberlain on drums.

A grandiloquent "sonic novel", Scarlet's Walk is a travelogue constructed in the beat tradition popularized by Jack Kerouac. Described as a concept album documenting the travels and experiences of the fictional Scarlet as she crosses modern day USA from West Coast to East Coast, the album contains songs which are capable both of standing on their own and coming together to form one intricate and moving storyline.

Set against lush and bewitching arrangements, the flighty singer-songwriter crafts iconic tales resonant with haunting imagery and metaphors that mirror her labyrinthine cross-country trek in the wake of September 11. Unlike 2001's misguided Strange Little Girls, 1996's Boys For Pele with its alienating use of harpsichord, as well as 1998's From the Choirgirl Hotel and 1999's To Venus and Back with their unpalatable electronic rhythms, Scarlet's Walk is infinitely more radio friendly and signals a welcome return to the vein of her first two albums Little Earthquakes and Under The Pink.

Using her warm melodic voice as tool, Amos brings to life a cast of spell-binding characters: a fading porn star in Amber Waves, Native Americans in the a capella Wampum Prayer, a murder victim in Carbon, a misogynist homophobe in Pancake, a weary traveler in Don't Make Me Come to Vegas, African Americans on Virginia, and a gay boy in the Shawn Colvin-sque Taxi Ride (which pays tribute to the tragic death of gay celebrity makeup artist and Amos' close personal friend - Kevyn Aucoin).

While Ms Scary would be hard pressed to list down her favorite tracks from the 18 songs featured on this album (trust moi, it's that good), outstanding tracks include the harrowing I Can't See New York where Amos presents a narrator who is stuck inside a doomed hijacked airplane; the overtly political title track Scarlet's Walk which features Gothic organ strains and Amos' disquieting battle cry leaving terra; and the first single off the album, A Sorta Fairytale where she dissects her past relationships using solid harmonies that Sarah McLachlan would kill for.

At once ambitious and personal, Scarlet's Walk covers a wide emotional spectrum from sadness to confusion to soaring hope. With Amos' velvety voice soaring and swooping amidst the accompanying strains of a lonely fluttering piano, her new release is an epic beauty of an album that sounds stunning at first listen and continues to endear itself further with each subsequent listen.

So join Ms Scary as she grabs her Dior sunglasses and Hermes headscarf and prepares to re-immerse herself in the company of the high priestess of piano pop and embark on the aural road trip that is Scarlet's Walk.