Product Description

America's idiosyncratic queen of grown-up pop follows up 2005's 'The Beekeeper' with an album that is being hailed as areturn to the dark, harrowing feel of her early 90s work. Performed by a "posse" of five unique characters, all played by Amos and representing different facets of her personality, the album's subject matter flits from the outspokenly political to the deeply personal. Produced by Amos herself and recorded at Martian Engineering in Cornwall, it includes the single 'Big Wheel' and, in this special edition, a DVD featuring a bonus track and behind the scenes footage.

Track Listing

Disc 1:

1. Yo George
2. Big Wheel
3. Bouncing Off Clouds
4. Teenage Hustling
5. Digital Ghost
6. You Can Bring Your Dog
7. Mr Bad Man
8. Fat Slut
9. Girl Disappearing
10. Secret Spell
11. Devils And Gods
12. Body And Soul
13. Father's Son
14. Programmable Soda
15. Code Red
16. Roosterspur Bridge
17. Beauty Of Speed
18. Almost Rosey
19. Velvet Revolution
20. Dark Side Of The Sun
21. Posse Bonus
22. Smokey Joe
23. Dragon

Disc 2:

1. Untitled
2. Behind The Scenes Footage

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #45127 in Music
• Released on: 2007-04-30
• Number of discs: 2
• Format: CD+DVD

Amazon.co.uk Review
In an era of digital downloads and singles, Tori Amos embraces the concept album in a sprawling 23-song oratorio. Firing across the American psychological, social, and political landscape, she takes on the state of the world, war, and feminism. To help her, she adopts five personas--her American Doll Posse--who take their characteristics from Greek gods, but not their names: Clyde, Pip, Isabel, Santa, and Tori. You need a scorecard to keep track, but don't worry. It's still Tori Amos, bending syllables in improbable pretzels with rippling piano themes and choruses that threaten to go Broadway at any moment. Amos vents her political spleen through "Isabel," leaving no doubt as to her targets on tracks like "Yo George," and comments on our impersonal age and computer addiction with "Digital Ghost." That's sung by the character "Tori," who is reputedly based on Demeter and Dionysus, representing the split between Amos's earth-mother side and her wilder, more libertine tendencies. Anti-war and pro-feminist themes are plastered across American Doll Posse like sloganeering posters. "Dark Side of the Sun" laments both sides of the war, including the Islamic extremists who lay down their lives "for some sick promise of heaven." Amos adopts a big '80s rock sound on many tracks, with guitarist Mac Aladdin pealing off Brian May-style guitar licks over an arena-rock beat. It's where Amos details a more personal sound that American Doll Posse leaves a lasting impression. "Girl Disappearing," sung by "Clyde," holds echoes of the Beatles' "Eleanor Rigby," not only because of the string quartet and nostalgic tone, but the updated tale of a woman losing herself. "Smokey Joe" brims with dark atmospheres, Robert Fripp-like guitar sustains, and Amos's most elaborate vocal arrangements, interweaving two sets of lyrics for "Pip." More than a concept album, American Doll Posse is a convergence experience, mixing online blogs from each character, videos, MySpace sites, and more. --John Diliberto

Customer Reviews

Have to see the tracks perfomed live!
Saw Tori live on Tuesday night and I have to say my opinion of this album has soared seeing some of the tracks played live! Big Wheel, Bring Your Dog, Dragon, Bouncing of Clouds, Secret Spell and Body and Soul were fabulous. If you get a chance to catch her on her latest tour I'd seriously recommend it; it will give you a real appreciation of American Doll Posse.

Evokes neither glory days nor a promise of their return....but a catchy & comely enough diversion
When does originality's freshness mellow into the unchallenged comfort of a long married couple rocking on their porch....or, at the other end of the spectrum, an unconditional parental love? This is a question worth asking of both Tori Amos and a sizeable section of her fan base. We needn't ever truly miss the narcotically gorgeous music she produced in the 90's...there's always the "play" button; but pressing it is becoming more and more akin to Norma Desmond watching moving pictures of herself in her heyday from her private screening room. Even die hard fans like myself have finally been forced to admit that Amos's music has been steadily declining since the turn of the present century. This is the fourth of her efforts in a row that has run the concept album premise and accompanying publicity gimmicks into the ground.The songs in "American Doll Posse" are sung by 4 characters, all of whom Amos embodies (literally) on the album's cover and in her videos .

When asked why he didn't include a descriptive section on his female protagonist in the appendix to The Sound And The Fury, Faulkner replied: "remember, all Tolstoy said about Anna Karenina was that she was beautiful and could see in the dark like a cat....it's best to take the gesture, the shadow of the branch, and let the mind create the tree." Amos might have applied the same standard to her latest personas, just as she did so compellingly in the "Boys For Pele" days. We don't need to see the muses behind these songs, any more than we need to "see" Beethoven's late quartets...a lesson we could have learned from ancient Greece's Psyche and her tragic oil lamp. But Amos has pulled these girls out of the mist (or miasma, as circumstances dictate) and painted them all up for the ogling Sunday company. Her eccentricity is one of her most enduringly wonderful qualities, but the fact is that she's gotten increasingly careless about letting it be exploited in the name of marketing.

Fans hoping for a reprise of the "Earthquakes" through "Venus" era will remain disappointed...perhaps more so than ever....but "American Doll Posse" isn't a bad album on its own terms. Highlights include the sinister "Smokey Joe," which seems to materialize in a long white shift at the stroke of midnight and lead the listener into its dark labyrinths with a candle. The Billie Holiday drenched opening chorus of "Dragon" has fingers and a hot-oil carbonated spine. "Roosterspur Bridge" though cheesy, is also lovely and elegiac. The dreamy "Girl Disappearing" flits in and out of "The White Album" like a firefly. "Body And Soul" rocks, and I probably wouldn't throw the Ann & Nancy Wilsonish "You Can Bring Your Dog" or the honky tonking "Big Wheel" out of bed for eating crackers, either. "Digital Ghost" is a poignant...if rock ballady....anthem for the internet age; & "Bouncing Off Clouds," in spite of its silly lyrics, is arguably the best number on the album, and surely the most seamlessly crafted one. It's uninterrupted by the cacophonous guitar that waits in the alley to mug the otherwise sultry "Code Red." Would someone please chloroform Bret Michaels and detain him in a storage room until this song can play out in its entirety?

In one way, this album is a debut for Tori: we see...for the first time...that she, like Randy Newman, has a real mainline of Broadway in her blood. "Velvet Revolution" and the driving, exhilarating "Teenage Hustling" ("you've been skanking around with your talentless trash") run the gamut from "The Pajama Game" to "Rent".

Duds? "Secret Spell"...the album's only true "no no".... sounds like something that should be playing as the camera pans to an exterior shot of the high school in an Olson twins Hollywood blockbuster. "Almost Rosey" starts out promisingly, but disintegrates into generic arena rock. And anyone who says "Beauty Of Speed" doesn't sound exactly like Kate Bush is simply kidding themselves. The track is hard not to like....but it doesn't belong to Amos. Numbers like "Dark Side Of The Sun" feature garden-variety, hippie-dippy protest lyrics that are miles beneath Amos's keen sense of poetry and the way it can be used, paradoxically, to communicate linear ideas more effectively via non-linear methods.

Amos has been cheating on her genius with unworthy ideas from the wrong side of the tracks ever since 2002's largely superfluous "Scarlet's Walk". That said, the early nuptial glow of her 90's work may have gone the way all epic romances eventually do, but where there is potential like hers, there is hope; and her muses still cut a palely desirable, distinctly un-Havishamian figure in their decidedly faded wedding finery.

Tori experimenting and going a step further...
ADP has many interesting songs that do not necessary follow the style Tori has accustomed us to. The sound has progressed to use more drums and guitars with the exception of e.g. Yo George... My personal favorite is Bouncing off Clouds.

Overall I think Tori is experimenting to improving and differentiating herself from her earlier work which I think is a good thing. However, her equilibrium has not yet reached a point where she can produce masterpieces like her first 3 albums ('Little Earthquakes', 'Under the Pink' and 'Boys for Pele') contain. It is still interesting to see where this experimentation takes Tori!!!