Let the choir sing

One would think the line “let the choir sing” would be the perfect line to initiate a choir’s singing, especially at a concert where they were already present.

One would think that a five minute song whose magic is contained mostly in a seven-second held note would be readily conveyed because, well, what is seven seconds out of five minutes?

One would also think that Tori Amos would order her setlist so as to provide a lot of sonic variety, in terms of key, tempo, and energy, i.e. not place “Cooling” and “Winter” together on a setlist just because they both deal with cold things.

None of these would have been correct assumptions at Saturday night’s Tori Amos concert, the second of two at London’s Carling Apollo Hammersmith.

Set list:

Original Sinsuality
Father Lucifer
Icicle
Mother Revolution (with choir)
Take to the Sky
Yes, Anastasia
Bells for Her

Father Figure
Like a Prayer

Winter
Cooling
Jamaica Inn
Witness (with choir)
The Beekeeper

Sweet the Sting (on the B3 Hammond with choir)
Rattlesnakes

Hoochie Woman (with choir)
Hey Jupiter

On the subject of assumptions, the aforementioned set list is not congruent with any of the ones I had for this show. While listening to the Jonathan Ross Morning show on Saturday before heading down to the venue, I got butterflies in my stomach when I heard the choir would be at the concert and they’d be singing all four songs (which of course meant the debuts of “Witness” and “Hoochie Woman”) on the Beeekeeper on which they appear. She’d also mentioned two of my favorite songs (“Cars and Guitars” and “Northern Lad”) and a much-requested cover (David Bowie’s “Life on Mars”), and since this was the second London show I kind of assumed that all this would just be icing on the cake and there’d be more than that came from.

But sadly, the choir songs WERE the cake. And a mighty sweet cake they were, angel food I think, but angel food cake sans icing is too dry for my taste.

And aside from the lush stylings the choir added to the songs on which they appeared, this show did sound dry, even though the aforementioned “Winter” and “Cooling” are ice songs and ice melts into water and it was 17,000 degrees in the Apollo.

And let’s just say that “Take to the Sky” “Bells for Her” the missing seven-second high note on “Anastasia” and the flubbed covers didn’t do much to counter that.

And did I mention this show had Atlanta, Chastain Park 2003-esque security?

Well, I just did, and it was that bad.

I suppose the show was all in all better than the first London show (as I’d know it would be). I just didn’t think she’d go all out with the choir songs and then surround them with all of this tour’s more mediocre guests.

But she did. So what could have been an excellent show was just mediocre; the highs were VERY VERY high—“Witness” and “Mother Revolution” with the choir rank among my favorite Tori performances EVER—but the lows—i.e. most of the rest of the set—just made this cake seem a bit too done, which does not bode well for the surfacing of “Northern Lad”, since that one’s cake ISN’T done, though I don’t even think a half-done batter-y cake would have done well with the icing—or lack thereof—provided last night.