If Tori Amos’ enormous back catalog could be reduced to a single throughline, it would be her struggle with the devil. Just like in the Book of Genesis, Satan often takes the form of snakes and reptiles in her songs, as well as rapist, pillager, boyfriend, and, quite often, Amos herself. Up until her 2017 album, Native Invader, Satan stood in for an amalgam of everything malign: an archetype and recurring form within which Amos works. But in her most recent three albums, Satan takes on his most particular form yet: our present autocracy and oligarchy, embodied in the most overdetermined example of the trickster archetype, Donald Trump.
On her 18th studio album, In Time of Dragons, Amos draws on the long tradition of reptilian imagery to symbolize the elite, from ancient myth to David Icke’s conspiracy theories. She casts Trump and his tech-feudalist allies as reptilian dragons, singing on “23 Peaks”: “I want to be, so this dragon/Half dragon, half woman thing/Take this burden from me.” Here, Amos presents herself as both dragon slayer and dragon, torn between heroic impulses and the same traits she criticizes: greed and a violent appetite for luxury, which she links to Trump and to the ills of the present day.
With 17 songs and a long runtime, In Time of Dragons is a reminder that Tori Amos has never shied away from self-indulgence. Like many of her records, the album is a mixed bag. There are flashes of overwhelming tenderness and wind-stopping moments, and the songs are generally rich and full of character, populated by her usual cast of gay witches, Southern Baptist girls, medicine women, saints, and pre-Christian gods. But these figures do not feel fully developed, and they suffer from the same literalism that affects much politically reactive art today.
Donald Trump is a very convenient character, a perfect play-actor for the present, effectively staging a Greek tragedy inside a WWE ring. The difficulty is that writing about him can feel almost too convenient, and Amos’ music has become correspondingly literal since she began doing so. Trump is not the first president she has written about, but her approach once carried a streak of comic self-awareness: On her 2007 album, American Doll Posse, she titled a song about George W. Bush “Yo George!”
“Shush,” In Time of Dragons’ opening song, crudely demands attention. The ever-fantastic Matt Chamberlain plays a heavy wallop of gut-rumbling drums which Amos pairs with a piano line reminiscent of Nine Inch Nails’ The Downward Spiral era in its descending, tortile intensity, even as it remains unmistakably marked by Amos’ densely worked, surging runs. Her voice, now lowered and roughened by age, serves the material well, adding a grain that makes the track feel genuinely unsettled.
But the bluntness of the lyrics arrives just as quickly, undercutting the atmosphere by naming too plainly what the music had already begun to evoke with greater force. “Patriarchy,” “hierarchy,” “democracy,” she sings, splitting each of these words into phonemes that stretch the melodic line, yet no vocal trickiness can disguise the blatancy. She self-references “Silent All These Years,” the song that broke her career, which only sharpens the contrast. The nonsensical edge to that song’s expression of protest—“My scream got lost in a paper cup”—came closer to something like truth, whereas here Amos has to strain toward it. “You put a finger to those beautiful lips,” she sings, the language clanging against the surface.
The greatest Amos return to form is “Provincetown,” which marks the thrilling reappearance of the harpsichord, an instrument that hasn’t featured in Amos’ work since her 1996 masterpiece, Boys for Pele. Here, it sounds less feral and much more controlled than on Boys for Pele, its clipped decay leaving space for the forceful bass and drums, while adding an ornate and highly structured prog-rocky layer. Later, on the album’s best song, “Blue Lotus,” which sounds like a mix between Boys for Pele and Amos’ 2005 album, The Beekeeper, she errs closer to the instrument’s origins, playing baroque filigrees against a warm and sustained Rhodes accompaniment.
Unfortunately, even in the album’s best moments, In Time of Dragons pales against Amos’ early work. While it’s true that her early opuses—pretty much every album up until 2009’s Abnormally Attracted to Sin—have been unfairly written out of music history, later releases (save for the slightly redeeming 2014 record Unrepentant Geraldines) slipped from that exceptional, best-in-class level. And much of her recent output is in conversation with the present, making it difficult to historicize. In Time of Dragons won’t restore that reputation. It is a decent entry in her catalog, but by no means essential. Her mythology has become a little too bare-faced, more Game of Thrones than the compelling, fanciful cosmology of her past.
