Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * *
When Genesis released their debut album, From Genesis to Revelation, the sales it received could have seen any of the labels that were around at the end of the 1960s keep the band at arms-length until they split up and left them bitter and forlorn musicians. Thankfully they were given time, their music given the space to find its own special way in the world. Roll on 20 years and the young Tori Amos, the woman who would go onto become of the biggest female acts of all time, was about to suffer the same fate with her debut album as part of the band with the same name, Y Kant Tori Read.
Looking at the career of Tori Amos, there would be many who by-pass this initial foray into her life as a musician, stating that they either didn’t realise she had produced the album in 1988 or that like Genesis’ debut that it should be struck from the record books as it is not in the spirit of where she then came from a couple of years later with the phenomenal Little Earthquakes.
Although no debut album should ever be dismissed just because it doesn’t have the feel of how the artist then grew and refined their sound, it also should not be forgotten, to left to rot on a back shelf in a second hand shop, gathering dust for all time.
Y Kant Tori Read is no Little Earthquakes and that is a good thing. It is one thing to produce a brilliant cast iron debut with no hangovers and which that over 20 years later still gets the kind of attention deserving of some of the classics, to produce a record that flips everything upside down from where the career started makes it even more inspiring and rousing. As an album, that included the likes of future Guns and Roses drummer Matt Sorum and Steve Caton on guitar, Y Kant Tori Read owes more to the genre of excess that the late 1980s was fast becoming. Big hair, a big sound no matter the talent and as far away from the ideals of music that Ms. Amos would be greatly applauded for with her look at women’s issues, the album sounds more as if owes greatly to Heart and Pat Benatar than to her own ideals. It may have sounded like Heart but it didn’t have the boldness or conviction to carry the symbolic coupling off.
Listening now 25 years to the album, what may strike anyone daring to dip their toe into the early life of Tori Amos is how, despite not sounding bold or daring, it had courage, a bucketful of nerve to show that Tori deserved to be able to go away, get the sound right and come back as a refined advocate of women in music. The recording may not have the appreciation garnered upon every other album she has put out for her fans but there are the stirrings, a glimpse of what was to come, even if does sound at first as if it would be her one and only album.
The people in charge, those that even the money men lower their head to in deference, in the 60s, 70s and to an small extent the early 80s gave the artists time to grow, to get the music right as they knew that at some point the return would be there, the band or the singer would suddenly hit upon the right song, the right vein in which to showcase their music, a tweak here, a shift in priorities there and all of a sudden the musicians became the biggest names on the planet. That is something that was told to Ms. Amos and on the back of songs that wouldn’t go amiss even now from a compilation, the opener The Big Picture, Heart Attack At 23 and Cool On Your Island, with a the kind of refinement that Ms. Amos has bought to albums such as Scarlet’s Walk, American Doll Posse or Abnormally Attracted To Sin.
Y Kant Tori Read will never make that many friends with her fan base, for the most part it is sluggish, it doesn’t shine with any type of radiance but it is worth a dip into every now again, should as a listener you are able to find a copy as it is notoriously hard to find, to remind anyone with an open mind that sometimes an album is just an album but what it can spawn can be incredible. For any artist; poet, musician, actor, that opening disappointment can be just the spur, the catalyst in which to become amazing, all it takes is patience, time and someone else’s belief as well as their own.
Ian D. Hall