专辑简介Boys for Pele, the title of Tori Amos´s epic third album, is as awkward and confusing as the music inside. Though it sounds like a recruitment slogan for Little League soccer, the name actually refers to the lost temples of feminine divinity. Pele, you see, is the Hawaiian volcano goddess; the boys, well, they´re the sacrifices that quell the rumbling lady´s rage. Attempting to regain fires stolen long ago, Pele rewrites the crucifixion to star a girl Jesus and in doing so conjures a forgotten matriarchal mythology. While Amos´s characters--Jupiter, Muhammad, Lucifer--are male by name, the aural landscape into which they´re thrown is as symbolically and expressionistically female as Georgia O´Keeffe´s skull-and-roses paintings. Pele is a complex and formless--and often impenetrable--work of gothic-pop chamber music, both beautiful and ghostly in its nearly complete reliance on Amos´s rolling Bosendorfer grand piano, chilling harpsichord (which she bangs like a courtly punk rocker), and acrobatic voice (as earthy as Joni Mitchell´s and as otherworldly as Bjork´s). Unfortunately, she takes us only halfway: her songs engage and challenge us to understand, but the imagery offers few clues to help us crack their frustrating opacity. Pele ends up as much a pretentious and self-indulgent trip as it is a synthesis of talent, imagination, and skewed vision. Still, there´s reason to celebrate that an album as formalistically and thematically alien to pop audiences as Pele would win such quick success upon its original release.