Tori Amos: In Times of Dragons Album Review

If Tori Amos’ enormous back catalog could be reduced to a single throughline, it would be her struggle with the devil. Just like in the Book of Genesis, Satan often takes the form of snakes and reptiles in her songs, as well as rapist, pillager, boyfriend, and, quite often, Amos herself. Up until her 2017 album, Native Invader, Satan stood in for an amalgam of everything malign: an archetype and recurring form within which Amos works. But in her most recent three albums, Satan takes on his most particular form yet: our present autocracy and oligarchy, embodied in the most overdetermined example of the trickster archetype, Donald Trump. On her 18th studio album, In Time of Dragons, Amos draws on the long tradition of reptilian imagery to symbolize the elite, from ancient myth to David Icke’s conspiracy theories. She casts Trump and his tech-feudalist allies as reptilian dragons, singing on “23 Peaks”: “I want to be, so this dragon/Half dragon, half woman thing/Take this burden from me.” Here, Amos presents herself as both dragon slayer and dragon, torn between heroic impulses and the same traits she criticizes: greed and a violent appetite for luxury, which she links to Trump and to the ills of the present day. With 17 songs and a long runtime, In Time of Dragons is a reminder that Tori Amos has never shied away from self-indulgence. The album features flashes of overwhelming tenderness and wind-stopping moments, rich and full of character, populated by her usual cast of gay witches, Southern Baptist girls, medicine women, saints, and pre-Christian gods. However, these figures do not feel fully developed, and they suffer from the same literalism that affects much politically reactive art today. Writing about Trump can feel almost too convenient, and Amos’ music has become correspondingly literal since she began doing so. Trump is not the first president she has written about, but her approach once carried a streak of comic self-awareness. On her 2007 album, American Doll Posse, she titled a song about George W. Bush ‘Yo George!’ The opening song of In Time of Dragons, ‘Shush,’ crudely demands attention. The ever-fantastic Matt Chamberlain’s gut-rumbling drums and Amos’ piano line evoke Nine Inch Nails’ The Downward Spiral era, though it remains unmistakably marked by Amos’ dense, surging runs. Her voice, now lowered and roughened by age, serves the material well, adding a grain that makes the track feel unsettled. The bluntness of the lyrics arrives quickly, undercutting the atmosphere by naming too plainly what the music had already begun to evoke. ‘Patriarchy,’ ‘hierarchy,’ ‘democracy,’ she sings, splitting each word into phonemes that stretch the melodic line, yet no vocal trickiness can disguise the blatancy. She self-references ‘Silent All These Years,’ the song that broke her career, which only sharpens the contrast. The nonsensical edge of that song’s expression of protest—‘My scream got lost in a paper cup’—came closer to something like truth, whereas here Amos has to strain toward it. ‘You put a finger to those beautiful lips,’ she sings, the language clanging against the surface.