Universal Republic
Christmas Music, 2009
Tori Amos’s later albums often come with a backstory far juicier than the music itself. For Midwinter Graces, according to Ms Amos herself, this glitter-dusted bauble of an album happened because Doug Morris, then CEO of Universal Music Group, suggested that she cranked out a Christmas album on short notice.
Now, when your boss suggests something in the entertainment biz, it’s usually delivered with the same casual menace as a mobster suggesting you take a long walk off a short pier. Considering her next album showed up on a different label entirely, you don’t need a tinfoil hat to sense that Mr Morris was effectively saying, “One more album and get outta my hair, Tori.”
What better way to fulfill a contractual obligation than a Christmas album? Unless your name is Mariah Carey, Christmas albums aren’t cash cows — they’re musical IOUs dressed up in tinsel and good cheer. It’s basically the music industry equivalent of showing up at a party you hate, drinking a lukewarm eggnog, and slipping out after the first round of Secret Santa.
To her credit, Ms Amos avoids the more obvious typical mistletoe-fodder. No O Holy Night. No sad drummer boy pa-rum-pum-pum-pumming his way into oblivion. Instead, she dusts off and adds her own interpretation of some rather more obscure carols like What Child, Nowell, Candle: Coventry Carol, and Holly, Ivy, and Rose — or as I like to call them, Medieval Christmas Songs for Witches Who Drink Mead by Candlelight.
Naturally, Ms Amos gives them all more pretentious titles, because it wouldn’t be a Tori Amos album without at least three songs that sound like titles of unpublished Sylvia Plath poems.
The arrangements are what you’d expect from her at her most restrained: piano, harpsichord, strings, synths, and whatever ambient ghost noises she had on hand.
The problem is, in trying to go solemn and ethereal, everything starts sounding like a Renaissance Faire funeral dirge. Part of me desperately wanted her to shriek banshee-style over an industrial beat while a demon choir wailed in Latin, but alas, it’s all very polite, very midwinter-y, and very likely to make your party guests quietly gather their coats.
Then there are the original songs. There are six of them, allegedly. I say “allegedly” because unless you’re staring at the writer credits, it’s hard to tell where the covers end and the originals begin. Snow Angel, for example, is basically Winter in a new wig and a slightly sadder mood. It could’ve been titled Winter on My Tongue All These Years, Mother and no one would blink.
That said, there’s one shining, slightly tipsy star atop this otherwise sleepy tree: Harps of Gold. It actually has a tempo, a chorus that wakes you up, and—dare I say—a Tori who sounds like she gives a damn. But then again, it’s based on Angels We Have Heard on High, which already slaps. It’s like claiming victory in a race you only won because you were the only one wearing running shoes.
In the end, Midwinter Graces isn’t particularly bad, it’s just… there. It’s the musical equivalent of a politely wrapped box of bath salts from your office’s Secret Santa. Not offensive, not exciting, just a thing you now own. Tori Amos completists will buy it and file it alphabetically after Little Earthquakes, while the rest of us will only bust it out when we want the Christmas party to wind down and guests to start saying, “Well, it’s getting late…”
Wait, I guess it does have its use after all!
