Thrill 4-15: Neurotic austerity? {Martha's Foolish Ginger}

Alright, I confess. I simply could not come up with a title for this post that satisfied me. The above is the best I can come up with to define what appeals to me about Martha's Foolish Ginger, the first in what I consider an outstanding grouping of tracks that closes The Beekeeper after the lengthy title track.

I already mentioned (probably some months ago!) that there are four songs on the album that strike me as amongst the most beautiful-sounding Tori Amos has ever constructed: Jamaica Inn and Sleeps With Butterflies were the first two, and Goodbye Pisces is still to come.

Martha's Foolish Ginger stands apart from these in many respects. Whereas the others (especially the first two) are warm and lush, Martha's is stripped down to its bare essentials. The verses in particular are little more than an insistent drum beat, a piano figure that focuses on two notes, and a nervous flicker of guitar. The unusually high vocal only emphasises the empty spaces.

And that's why I love it.

There's something that's always appealed to me about music that's made from small, seemingly unpromising cells. It's a dangerous tightrope act, requiring that the right cells are selected. Most of my gnashing of teeth over dance tracks is because they pick the wrong bar of music to repeat incessantly. At the other end of the spectrum, there are pieces of Classical music that do extraordinary things with tiny ideas. The 1st movement of Beethoven's 5th symphony is as good an example as any. Ba-ba-ba-buuuuuum.

To me, Martha's is an example of doing a lot of good things with a little material. Those verses appeal to my obsessive-compulsive streak, I think. Just when it could become a bit much, the end of the line resolves into a definite key, and leads to a chorus that adds just the right amount of melody to warm things up. Literally, on the word 'just', and also on 'I'. If those harbour lights had just been a half a mile inland, who knows what I would have done.

Those two little high points in the already high melody, when everything else in the song is bent on behaving like a ticking clock, make all the difference. The right touch in the right place, and we've moved from boring to entrancing.