There was a time when I really loved Tori - memory is unreliable when it comes to things as diffuse as music, but it was something like from 1999 through to early 2003-ish (ie, from year 12 or so up to about the beginning of fourth year uni) - but that time's now pretty much in the past. While I still reckon to venus and back to be her finest hour (much as I like all four of the albums which came before it), for mine, Strange Little Girls was a serious misfire, Scarlet's Walk a muddled, indistinct offering partially redeemed by a handful of strong songs (my initial impressions of it were more positive, but then, as the exhaustive treatment of both Scarlet's Walk and back catalogue in my epinions piece of the time suggests, I was still very much into Tori when it came out, back in October '02), and the new cuts on Tales of a Librarian pleasantly lush but not at all touched by greatness; and in any case, to a considerable extent I've grown out of the old, classic lps as well.
Even so, I had to listen to The Beekeeper, just in case (and particularly given that Tori has a history of making musical turns out of left field, to mix my metaphors) - but alas, while it's worthy enough, it's also basically Scarlet's Walk redux, and probably the first time in her recording history that she's really stood still from one lp to the next (even if SLG, at least, was a rather dramatic backwards step). I haven't listened to it that carefully, and I'm sure that a few of the pretty songs will get prettier, and there'll be at least one or two other growers in amidst the 19 songs/79 minutes, but just now it doesn't seem worth the investment of time to find them. (Then again, I've been asking myself what more I could've wanted from a new Tori album...perhaps the truth is just that I'm over her almost no matter what she might release from now on...)
