Eruditorum Press

Crash log of the Singularity

Elizabeth Sandifer

About Elizabeth Sandifer

http://www.eruditorumpress.com

Elizabeth Sandifer created Eruditorum Press. She’s not really sure why she did that, and she apologizes for the inconvenience. She currently writes Last War in Albion, a history of the magical war between Alan Moore and Grant Morrison. She used to write TARDIS Eruditorum, a history of Britain told through the lens of a ropey sci-fi series. She also wrote Neoreaction a Basilisk, writes comics these days, and has ADHD so will probably just randomly write some other shit sooner or later. Support Elizabeth on Patreon.

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Nikola Tesla’s Night of Terror Review

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Were I of a cynical mind, I might suggest that the show is in dire straits when a great man of history story that proclaims the future to belong to a white guy and suggests that it’s good to be a billionaire stands out as a relative highlight of the season. Except we all know that the show is in embarrassing shape, with a showrunner who continues to struggle with the notion of aboutness in narrative. Why take an episode whose sins all fall under the heading of “basically the same shit the program does in all its celebrity historicals” and complain about that when it breaks a five episode streak of the show breaking down in far more fundamental ways?

All of which is to say that “Nikola Tesla’s Night of Terror” is pretty good, which is to say that it has the basics down in a way nothing since “It Takes You Away” has really come close to. There’s a refreshing sense of conceptual unity—the conflict between Tesla and Edison, where Tesla is a visionary inventor and Edison a more cynically pragmatic and business-oriented sort, is mirrored by the technological scavenger villains. There’s a sense of actually getting the guns on the mantleplace to go off—Wardenclyffe is introduced early on, then becomes a cool location for a last stand. Tesla’s message from Mars (a real historical detail) is brought up, then made use of. And the basic ideas are just fun. Tesla is an obvious choice of historical figures for Doctor Who to do—an opportunity to do a big steampunk romp that matches well with Whittaker’s more “get her hands dirty working on stuff” character, at least when they remember to have that be a trait. 

There are oddities, but most of them aren’t the fault of this script. Even in the hands of a competent writer, three companions turns out to simply be too many to make work in a fifty minute episode when you also have to introduce a bespoke world. Nobody is well-served here, and it mostly feels like you could give different scenes to different people with no real substantive changes to the episode. The cast is unwieldy and everyone is suffering from it. There’s also a bizarre lack of consistency to the Doctor’s characterization as her pacifism goes out the window in order to have her revel in the potential destruction of an alien race. Guns remain bad, but giant lightning-shooting towers are great. But this is largely a good change to the character, whose passivity and lack of willingness to confront evil has been a major problem. Sure, it’s weird to see copyright infringement be the hill upon which she’ll kill, but the fact remains that this is Whittaker’s most (forgive me) electrifying villain confrontation yet.

In the end, though, the cynicism is inescapable. This is a daft celebrity historical romp. It’s the best story of the season to date, but that just means that this is a season where the daft historical romps are the standout highlights.…

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This Primitive Planet and Its Affairs (The Crusade)

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It’s March 27th, 1965. Between now and April 17th, 470 people will die in a dam burst and landslide in Chile, 20 will die when a car bomb is detonated outside the US embassy in Saigon, two will die when the first aircraft lost in air-to-air combat during the Vietnam War are shot down during a strike on the Thanh Hóa Bridge, and somewhere north of 250 people will die in the Midwestern United States in what are called the Palm Sunday Tornadoes, while Richard Hickock and Perry Smith will be executed by hanging for the murders of the Herbert Clutter family, Princess Mary wll die of a heart attack on the grounds of her estate at Harewood House, and the world will edge incrementally closer to the eschaton. Also, The Crusade airs.

Acclaimed Doctor Who critic Philip Sandifer (whatever happened to him?) once attempted to classify the historical stories into two moulds defined by the Season One writers of the genre. Like most of his work, this is insightful but ultimately over-simplified. The more productive approach is to read the historicals as advancing dialectically between John Lucarotti’s harder edged approach to historicals, in which they are a vehicle for exploring foreign cultures, and Dennis Spooner’s more comedic one, in which they are a vehicle for playing with genre tropes. In this reading, David Whittaker’s script for The Crusade serves as synthesis before the entire genre is ultimately collapsed by Spooner’s own season-ending story The Time Meddler, which short-circuits the entire serious-minded approach by instead synthesizing his own approach to historicals with the sci-fi genre that the show would ultimately settle into permanently. But that’s a discussion for later. 

Whittaker’s approach, meanwhile, is to run two separate historicals in parallel, with limited interplay between them. On one side we have the court of Richard the Lionheart, where the already well-regarded Julian Glover reigns over a bunch of courtiers who at times offer dialogue actually written in iambic pentameter. Here, in other words, we get Doctor Who having a romp in the grand realm of respectable BBC Shakespeare. Barbara and Ian, meanwhile, find themselves on the Arab side in the court of Saladin, where they explore much more uneasy ground and do a more Lucarottian exploration of foreign culture.

Whittaker does much to complicate this division—the Christian side may be a genre romp, but it’s the most respectable and highbrow genre open to the series, while the Muslim side finds plenty of opportunities for feats of derring-do and melodramatic set pieces such as Tutte Lemkow’s villainous thief Ibrahim tying Ian to the sand and threatening him with scaphism. This is, in other words, a true alchemical fusion, in which each of the two sides of the story are not just laid next to each other but tempered with each other to form something new. 

More to the point, however, Whitaker goes to considerable length to parallel the two sides of the story. Both Richard and Saladin are noble, judicious figures, but each has a key advisor who is altogether more unscrupulous and antagonistic.…

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Fair Boy Your Eyes (Song For Eric)

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Song for Eric (demo, 1990)

Song for Eric (live, 1991)

Song for Eric (1992)

Song for Eric (live, 1994)

Song for Eric (live, 1996)

The b-sides for Little Earthquakes are a mixture of fine songs that it’s difficult to see how missed the album, or that if it is clear, it comes down purely to tonal fit instead of quality—“Upside Down” and “Take to the Sky”—and the usual mix of songs that fall just short of the album tracks that did make it—“Mary” and “Sweet Dreams.” And then there is “Song for Eric,” the only song among the Little Earthquakes sessions to simply be bad. An a capella love song framed entirely in fantasy romance pablum about a “fair maiden” who will “wait all day for my sailor” that unironically includes the phrases “over hill and dale” and “you know me like the nightingale,” it is at best a cut rate version of “Etienne,” and at worst a rehash of the character-based love songs she wrote as a teenager. (It’s worth comparing specifically to “Rubies and Gold,” which is essentially the same song only with a baroquely complex musical arrangement instead of an a capella delivery.)

Exactly what happened here is hard to discern, not least because it’s one of only two Little Earthquakes-era songs upon which Amos has literally never made any sort of comment. It was on the rejected first version of Little Earthquakes, sequenced between “Sweet Dreams” and the terminally unreleased “Learn to Fly,” but the commercially released version (dumped on a limited edition reissue of “Silent All These Years” in the UK) comes from the London-based 1991 sessions with Ian Stanley that yielded “China.” 

Where the second set of sessions for Little Earthquakes were an effort to reconceptualize the album away from the excessive lightness of the Siegerson tracks, these London sessions were essentially just extra. After rejecting the first cut of the album and giving Amos no end of grief (as described in “Leather”), Atlantic executive Doug Ross called Amos up after the second version to say, in his own words, “I don’t know how to tell you this, but I’ve fallen in love with your record.” (Ironically, the track that grabbed him was “Winter,” one that had been on the original version.) Still puzzling over how to promote an artist as unusual as Amos, Morris decided that the easiest thing to do would be to ship Amos off to London for a year to work the British market. With a much smaller geographic area and national radio stations, the UK had always been a more hospitable market for odd artists. Amos performed a set for East West honcho Max Hole, who as a devoted Kate Bush fan, made the leap to Amos fandom with relative ease, and Amos was up and running. And in the course of her UK residency, she found herself in the studio with former Tears for Fears member Ian Stanley cutting another set of songs.

These sessions are something of a curiosity in general—they’re by far the least remarked upon recording block for Little Earthquakes, and the songs that came out of them are a baffling mix—a handful of new songs Amos had penned between the completion of the home sessions with Eric Rosse in late 1990, a couple of covers, and a few reworkings of old material such as “China” and “Song for Eric” (and possibly “Girl” under one theory of “Thoughts”’s provenance).…

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Orphan 55 Review

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An episode with its heart in the right place and its head largely on the moon. In this regard it resembles Himes’ previous effort. The problem is that where “It Takes You Away” moved among a bunch of elements that were batshit weird and largely unlike anything we’d ever seen before, “Orphan 55” moves through a bunch of Doctor Who standards. These are generally among the more interesting Doctor Who standards—a dodgy resort a la The Macra Terror or Delta and the Bannermen, the main reveal from The Mysterious Planet, and a big heavy-handed environmental message like it’s The Green Death. These are all basically good components.

Unfortunately, Himes’s sugar rush sense of momentum keeps any of them from going anywhere. The supporting cast is overstuffed and undercooked, feeling at times like a cut-rate Voyage of the Damned. Interesting ideas flop oddly around the screen, briefly contemplating becoming significant plot threads before declining to. What exactly are the Dregs doing, killing some people and weirdly torturing Benni in a way that doesn’t actually make him stop being a weird comic relief character? What’s the actual substance of the relationship between Kane and Bella? There are stories here, but they’re being rushed past in favor of something that structurally feels more or less like The Ghost Monument.

This remains extremely puzzling to see. There’s a continual failure to quite remember what stories are supposed to look like. This is structured like a serial that we’re watching all the parts of in 45 minutes. And the parts appear to be about six minutes long. This is a more coherent structure than Chibnall himself generally manages, but it’s baffling to see Doctor Who suddenly attain the basic narrative cohesion of a shitty 90s cult television show. Ian Levine’s hilarious “friendship over with Doctor Who, now Babylon 5 is my best friend” bit two years ago actually makes a vague amount of sense in a world where Doctor Who feels like it’s on the same basic quality level of Seaquest DSV. It’s like a peek into the universe where Fox picked Doctor Who over Sliders in 1996. 

Reviewing it ends up feeling a lot like when I did comic reviews—that immensely frustrating sense week after week of going “you are failing at the most basic tasks of actually telling a coherent story.” Except comics are a low-paying medium run by companies more exploitative of both employees and customers than usual in which the reason people work is usually fannish love instead of actual talent. This is BBC One in the age of Peak Fucking Television, and it leaves you wishing they’d go hire Dan Weiss and David Benioff, who at least understand what earning your dramatic payoff should look like in the abstract, even if they can’t actually make it work. This isn’t even broadly shaped like coherent televisual narrative—it’s just vomiting a random set of concepts at the screen and hoping a point comes out somewhere.

Actually, that’s unfair—it’s perfectly willing to hammer you in the face with its point.…

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He’ll Burn Everything; Us Too (The Daleks)

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It’s December 21st, 1963. Between now and February 1st, 1964 128 people will die in a cruise ship fire north of Madeira, 25 people will die in riots in the Panama Canal Zone, 100 will die in anti-Muslim riots in Calcutta, three will die when an American fighter jet accidentally strays into East German space and is shot down, while Pamela Johnson will be murdered in Manchester, New Hampshire, T.H. White will die of heart failure, and the world will edge incrementally closer to the eschaton. Also, The Daleks will air on television.

The Daleks sits suspended between two eschatons, the seemingly defeated threat of fascism on one side, the thus-far averted threat of nuclear annihilation on the other. In one sense these are distinct threats, although 1960s Britain remained broadly aware that fascism was not eliminated forever and that it required a perpetual vigilance lest it arise in a period where it could find itself in control of a nuclear arsenal. But the Daleks are both too much and too little to quite fit into the straightforward “what if Hitler had the bomb” framework. It is a truism that pop culture nazis are curiously devoid of substance—an empty pair of jackboots into which any meaning can be shoehorned so long as it’s evil. But The Daleks exists too close to the Third Reich to engage in this amnesia—details like the fact that the Daleks were once a race of teachers and philosophers who live in a conspicuously expressionist city, or their chilling assertion that killing the Thals isn’t murder, it’s extermination make it clear that this is written with a vivid and real memory of Nazi Germany.

And yet other details fundamentally undermine this link. Most strangely is the degree to which the Thals are depicted as, in Susan’s words, “perfect,” and more to the point the degree to which that perfection is specifically rooted in their status as muscular blonde men of the exact sort that Nazis revered as a physical and racial ideal. This is a mere detail, albeit a deeply strange one. More substantial is the Daleks’ status as monsters created by the aftermath of nuclear war, mutated by radiation. This is, to state the obvious, not why the Germans became Nazis. It moves fascism from something that happens within societies as a result of specific social forces to something that happens to them because of external forces.

We could even sharpen this observation, noting the quasi-supernatural nature of radiation here. There is always a touch of the fantastic in our rhetoric around radiation, whether in the chilling and prophetic horror of “this is not a place of honor” or the openly gothic “walking ghost” phase after radiation poisoning. And its nature enables this—insidious, pervasive, and yet invisible, undetectable save for its lethality. It exemplifies the strange divide between Weird and Gothic, existing as a product of physics as it begins to get strange and yet behaving like nothing so much as a ghost. And The Daleks leans into this—the Daleks themselves are firmly Weird, with a design that leans hard into the inhuman by discarding as many vestiges of the human form as is plausible while still being able to stick an actual person inside it, and their city leans hard into this.…

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The Dream King (Tear in Your Hand)

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Tear in Your Hand (1992)
Tear in Your Hand (live, 1992)
Tear in Your Hand (live, 1998)
Tear in Your Hand (TV performance, 2002)
Tear in Your Hand (official bootleg, 2005)
Tear in Your Hand (official bootleg, 2007, Tori set)
Tear in Your Hand (live, 2014)

 

Preludes and Nocturnes

We all know where this is going, but let’s start with the actual song: a comparatively uptempo breakup song. The temptation to make another Y Kant Tori Read comparison is obvious from the description, which makes the song all the more surprising given how radically far from that it actually ends up. There are obvious reasons for this. For one, “Tear In Your Hand” is, like most of Little Earthquakes, built around Amos’s piano, which offers a jaunty descending riff doubled by Amos’s initial “yai la la lai lai lai lai” vocal line. This is not a song of swaggeringly wounded pride or of pained yearning, but something altogether more trickster-like. Amos is teasing in her vocal, maintaining a sense of humor throughout, as with “I don’t believe you’re leaving cause / me and Charles Manson like the same ice cream / I think it’s that girl.” Amos is clearly hurt by the breakup, most obviously in the bridge’s “cutting my hands up / every time I touch you,” but has already obtained a position of ironic distance.

Musically, Amos describes the way she sought to keep the song relatively still despite its energetic performance: “I heard the music as a steady motion, no change really from verse and chorus, only the bridge that leads straight back like a loop to the same toll booth where you threw in some change to go around only to end up surrounded by the place you left,” suggesting that the departure and return gives a sense of perspective and little more. It’s a good structure, well-suited to the simultaneous emotional turmoil and stasis of a breakup, and slyly foreshadowed by the opening line: “all the world just stopped.”

But the bridge is not the first moment in which the musical steadiness is disrputed—that comes when the backing music cuts out momentarily while Amos sings, “if you need me, me and Neil will be / hanging out with the Dream King.” Neil, in this case is writer Neil Gaiman, and the Dream King is Morpheus, the lead character of his landmark Sandman series of comics. This invocation marks the first moment of Amos’s trickster role within the song—the first emotion other than her stunned confusion at the breakup, and in turn is the first instance of what Alex Reed has described as “Gaiman’s coinciding with a breaking free of patterns in Amos’s songs.”

 

A Doll’s House

Chronology is tricky here—ultimately the two phenomenon emerged in my life simultaneously but independently, a Bader-Meinhof phenomenon cross-cutting between the two. I unequivocally encountered Gaiman first, somewhere around 1995. A committed Douglas Adams fan left in the lurch by his failure to publish any books after 1992, I made the sensible lateral expansion into Terry Pratchett’s Discworld books following the release of the 1995 DOS-based adventure game for which former Doctor Who actor Jon Pertwee had done voices, which was enough to get me in the door.…

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Spyfall Part Two Review

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And lo, the “It has been __ episodes since we transmitted a complete piece of shit” board in Chibnall’s office ticks upwards to 3 without unduly threatening to actually be good. Spyfall is much like “End of Days” and “Exit Wounds” in this regard—not so much competent as non-incompetent, television stitched together by someone who has seen enough of it to know where all the pieces are supposed to go, but who has at best a hazy understanding of why they go where they do or what their purpose is. 

As with a lot of things that work this way—I made the same comparison last episode, but J.J. Abrams really is an obvious example—this results in a story that is mostly about whatever previous text the writer pinned up on their bulletin board as the model they’re going to emulate. Just like last week pinched set pieces from The Sontaran Stratagem/The Poison Sky and Army of Ghosts, this week we do Last of the Time Lords/The Sound of Drums and The Big Bang. Which, hey, nice to actually see Moffat get pilfered instead of undone. But on a broader scale, Chibnall’s main idea here seems to be nostalgia for the Davies era. On one level, fair enough. Last of the Time Lords was 13 years ago. That’s plenty of elapsed time for a nostalgia tour. On the other, the idea of Doctor Who during the Key to Time era slavishly recreating The War Machines would have felt jarring, and that’s roughly what’s happening here. It’s not that the statute of limitations on repeating this stuff has expired, it’s just that when the show has gone for an emphatic remake of past glories like this it’s never been a good thing—think Planet of the Daleks, Destiny of the Daleks, Arc of Infinity, or Attack of the Cybermen. Regardless of how good the stories are—and in no case has the answer been “very,” it’s just not a good sign for the show’s conceptual health when it’s being used as a vehicle for self-imitation. And yet here we are: a blithely homicidal Master, a destroyed Gallifrey, and secrets from Gallifrey’s ancient past.

I should stress that the problem here is imitation, not reference. This isn’t The Three Doctors or Remembrance of the Daleks or Hell Bent, remixing the past into something strange and new. This is a cynical feeling calculation—the show was a big pop culture hit during the Davies era, so if we do things exactly like they did then we’ll magically summon the audience back. Hey, we’ll even put the non-consensual mind wipes back in. As I’m writing this the overnights aren’t in yet, but one sincerely doubts this is going to work.

And yet, as mentioned, badness isn’t the problem this is having. In some ways this is a pity. Plenty of really bad Doctor Who is at least interesting, This is not that. The closest thing it has to a point—social media is bad—is lousy for all the same reasons the “oh no we actually have to talk” gag in Resolution was—a condescending “get off my lawn” whinge.…

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Spyfall Part One Review

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It is fair to ask what, at this point, we want from Chibnall-era Doctor Who. Obviously I want $800 a week to watch it in the first place, but since you’ve all decided to give me that, I suppose here we are. (Thanks, by the way. You’re all ridiculously generous, and I’d have felt terribly sad not reviewing this.) But more seriously, we should discuss what a successful Chibnall episode would be. After all, if we draw the line at “be at least as good as Dracula” then we’re just going to be depressed for nine and a half weeks. We’re going to need some sort of notion of what a good Chibnall story might be in the same way that one needs a notion of a good Eric Saward story or a good Bob Baker and David Martin story. 

Spyfall, after all, gets a lot of things not wrong. For instance, it has a coherent point and a sense of itself as being about something. There’s not a lot of follow-through on it—no real substance to its sense of “vastly powerful tech companies are dangerous and scary” or engagement with the materiality of these things—but it has a point. There is also no particular reason for this point to be wedded to a James Bond pastiche, but it’s certainly not inimacable to the genre the story is playing with. And certainly the presence of a genre to play in is a good thing, giving the story a clarity of focus and purpose that, say, The Battle of Ranskoor av Kolos or Arachnids in the UK did not really have.

Obviously this consists of setting an extremely low bar and allowing the show to step over it. And the show doesn’t even manage this without stubbing a toe on the way, with its middle section being curiously unmoored from the James Bond pastiche in favor of a ghost story in the Australian outback. But there’s a minimum standard of competently constructed television being met here in a way that was in no way routine last year. And there’s a certain acceptability to it—if Chibnall at his best can come in around the level of The Sontaran Stratagem/The Poison Sky (since he nicks a set piece out of it and all) then all right. That’s basically fine, y’know? Especially if the other writers—and it’s a pretty tasty-looking set of them in the middle six episodes this season—can provide some high points.

All of which is to say that things might basically be OK. Series 11 might turn out to be an unfortunately awkward blip before Doctor Who settles into something that’s not as scintillating as either of the eras before it, but that’s at least not so infuriatingly crap that one is left wanting to charge exorbitantly high amounts for reviews in the desperate hope that you won’t have to actually do them. On the basis of part one, Spyfall looks like it belongs to a perfectly adequate era of Doctor Who.…

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Kings Never Afraid to Burn (Little Earthquakes)

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Little Earthquakes (1992)

Little Earthquakes (live, 1992)

Little Earthquakes (live, 1997)

Little Earthquakes (live, 1998)

Little Earthquakes (live, 2003)

Little Earthquakes (live, 2007, official bootleg, Clyde set)

Little Earthquakes (live, 2014)

There are two approaches to choosing a title track for an album. One is to pick something that seems a thesis statement for the album, capturing its major musical and lyrical themes while not risking confusion by wanting to be a single. The other is  to pick something with a cool title. It is this latter approach that explains why an album dominated by fairly simply arranged piano ballads featuring confessional lyrics flecked with spots of idiosyncrasy is named after an austerely ominous song whose lyrics are basically wall to wall crypticness. 

Much of Little Earthquakes feels as though it appeared sui generis from nowhere save for the interior of Tori mos’s head. There are a few exceptions—the ruins and traces of Y Kant Tori Read and of the 80s at large lurk throughout the album. But for the most part, Amos feels profoundly singular. On top of that, Amos is historically extremely reticent to talk about her musical influences—one is left to infer them from what songs she chooses to cover, and given that her covers are often hostile takeovers rather than homages, this is an unreliable process at best. Nevertheless it bears mentioning that, excluding songs such as “Smells Like Teen Spirit” that were first recorded as studio tracks, Amos’s third most common cover in live shows is The Cure’s “Lovesong,” which has shown up repeatedly on tours starting with Under the Pink and continuing through Native Invader. 

“Lovesong” is of course off of The Cure’s 1989 album Disintegration, which is by far the safest choice if you’re ever cornered by angry goths and told to name the best Cure album. And while it’s not quite clear that Amos namechecks the album in “Little Earthquakes,” given that the song belongs to the same set of recordings where she explicitly references Nine Inch Nails and Sandman, there’s an aggressive plausibility to the suggestion that Amos might have been thinking of an album that had only released its last single a few months earlier when she picked the word. 

The better case, however, is simply found in the “Little Earthquakes”’ instrumentation. Its sweeping waves of dark synthesizers and deep drums conjure something very much like the drowned and moody beauty of The Cure’s masterpiece. The intro to “The Same Deep Water As You” is probably the best direct comparison, but Amos isn’t engaged in any sort of blithe homage of the sort that “You Go to My Head” was for Prince. “Little Earthquakes” is not using the same soundscape as Disintegration, opting to frame its forboding majesty around Amos’s piano instead of sprawling washes of guitar. It’s the difference between imitation and inspiration, and the fact that Amos has made that leap speaks volumes about how much she’s progressed since Y Kant Tori Read.…

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The Pain of the Respect Thereof (Girl)

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The traditional Eruditorum Press post-holiday ebook sale is running from now until January 2nd. Details are here.

Girl (1992)

Thoughts (1992)

Girl (live, 1992)

Girl (live, 1996)

Girl (live, 1998)

Girl (live, 2009)

Girl (live, 2017)

In many ways the slightest song on Little Earthquakes, “Girl” is hamstrung most obviously by its positioning as the second track on the album. Coming off of “Crucify,” it is doomed to be the markedly inferior of the two post-80s empower ballads. Coming immediately before the jaw-dropping triple threat of “Silent All These Years,” “Precious Things,” and “Winter,” it is subsequently doomed to be forgotten by “that doesn’t make you Jesus” at the absolute latest. That it made the album over “Upside Down,” ”Take to the Sky,” or even “Flying Dutchman” is in hindsight one of the more baffling decisions made about Little Earthquakes.

It’s not fair to say that “Girl” is a bad song. Indeed, individual moments are as fine as anything on the album—the haunting, arrhythmic male vocal over “sit in the chair and be good now,” or the mad spaghetti of sounds that make up the bridge. Really, the overall soundscape of the song is solid, even if there’s a slight degree of overproduction (a problem that arguably plagues all four of the Rosse/Amos tracks, but “Girl” is the least suited to maximalism).

The problem really is in its precise sequencing. Musically, it has the same debt to the 80s as “Crucify,” but where Siegerson’s restraint and desire to foreground Amos and her piano made for a well-crafted pop song with the 80s inflections you’d expect something in 1990 to have, Rosse and Amos’s excess begins to tilt the song towards the same mistakes as Y Kant Tori Read. There’s a profound difference of degree—“Girl” is a mile ahead of even the best songs on Y Kant Tori Read. But the basic error is the same, and coming after a song that does the same sort of thing musically only with vastly more panache is damaging. In the other direction, meanwhile, it also feels like a pale echo—“she’s been everybody else’s girl / maybe someday she’ll be her own” is the same sentiment as “Silent All These Years,” only dissociated onto an unnamed third party and made tentative as opposed to emphatic.

All of this oversimplifies. There is a dark mystery to “Girl” that the songs on either side lack—its skulking piano line laid over a firm drumbeat gives it a sense of strange menace, while its lyrics, with the girl crawling through the shadows, hints at a sense of abjection that makes it clear that this belongs to the same set of songs as “Precious Things” and “Little Earthquakes” as opposed to the cheerier confessionalism of the Siegerson songs. This isn’t simply a song that’s failing to live up to the ones on either side of it. But nothing that it’s doing comes off cleanly and decisively enough to distinguish it either.

Amos has largely seemed aware that the song doesn’t quite do the business.…

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