Review: With ‘In Times of Dragons,’ Tori Amos Vows to Slay the Patriarchy

“I knew a girl who wrote ‘Silent All These Years’/Where is she?” Tori Amos ponders at the end of “Shush,” the opening track of her 18th studio album, In Times of Dragons. The question is then immediately reframed—“Where am I?”—as the first line of the title track. Indeed, you may wonder where the Tori Amos of Little Earthquakes has gone, as her vocal performances are more restrained, at times raspy, throughout the new album’s 17 tracks.

There’s a husky, lived-in quality to Amos’s voice here, no doubt due to the wear and tear of age and endless touring. These rich, deeper vocal tones are fitting for a song with the title “Shush,” and they lend gravitas to the descending refrain of the reverent “St. Teresa”: “You are, you are, you are/Kissed by God.” Amos’s daughter, Natashya Hawley—whose supple upper register is a surprisingly reliable proxy for her mother’s—picks up the slack on songs like “Strawberry Moon” and “Veins,” a call-and-response about generational trauma and shame.

Would that Amos had seized on the opportunity to offset the limitations of her voice with more intricate compositions or arrangements. In a few instances—like “Tempest,” with its shifting key signatures—she does just that. The singer-songwriter has self-produced every album she’s made over the last three decades, and the rumbling St. Vincent-style bass of “Gasoline Girls” makes one wonder what In Times of Dragons might have sounded like with someone like Annie Clark on the boards.

For the most part, though, the album’s ambition is embodied in its mythology. If 1996’s Boys for Pele saw Amos visiting the devil in order to exorcise her grief over the loss of a lover, and 2002’s Scarlet’s Walk documented a road trip across America in the wake of 9/11, In Times of Dragons closes the circle. Tracing the artist’s sojourn through a nation that itself has mutated into something resembling hell, the album reprises the themes of those earlier efforts, examining what truth and power mean in a society ruled by terrible men.

The plodding “Shush” is sung largely from the perspective of the “Lizard Demon,” a stand-in for oppressive patriarchal forces. As has been the case with many latter-day Amos albums, her lyrics can be overtly literal, with references to “democracy,” “free speech,” and, on the brief “Ode to Minnesota,” “ICE [breathing] in fire’s wind.” But they can also occasionally elicit a well-earned chuckle: She extends an olive branch to supposed rival Courtney Love on “Shush” (“Can I live through this?/Courtney, thank you”), and seeks refuge from the Lizard Demon’s henchmen in the gay enclave of “Provincetown” (“Goin’ up to Provincetown/Gonna meet some bears there”), which features Pele-esque harpsichord.

But it’s the album’s stunning closer, “23 Peaks,” that fully captures both the allegorical lyricism and fusion of classical and prog-rock influences that made Amos an iconoclast. Opening with two-and-a-half minutes of ambient orchestral swells that conjure the wonder of reaching some sort of spiritual summit, the song feels triumphant but profoundly tragic, the apex of a lengthy journey that yields few answers. “The truth is, darling one/You will suffer…You just need to accept/That this will be,” Amos sings to her daughter, herself, and, just maybe, every woman and artist who takes up the torch in her wake.