Tori Amos' Rhythm Section @ The Orpheum

[music | Misfits - I Turned Into A Martian]

That might have been the most inappropriately mixed show I've ever been to. I've seen Tori Amos on 6 different tours, and that was by far the Cher-lookin'est Vag-grabbin'est humpiest I've ever seen her, but it didn't matter, you couldn't really hear a piano anyway.

We wished we had gotten to this show earlier so we could have seen more Yoav Sadan, but as it was, we got to see the last maybe 4 songs of his opening set. I'd never heard of him until we sat down, but it was quickly apparent that he was worth seeing. He played solo, and would start each song building up a set of multi-track loops of percussion (on his guitar) and guitar accompaniment tracks for the song, in a Zoë Keating-type style. He had multiple stompboxes to turn a given loop on and off so he could still improvise over it.

Evidently, we got to see open for Tori Amos. Pip likes to touch herself, a lot. And I think heard she likes her oatmeal lumpy, and it's been said she looks like MC Hammer on crack.

The showiness aside, the sound was horrible. I want to hang someone, since she's married to a damn sound engineer. The piano was so far down in the mix that you could barely hear it most times, in fact, you heard mostly drum and bass guitar the entire time, which was pretty disappointing. Many times drowning out even her singing. I never thought I'd go to a Tori Amos show where piano was a tertiary instrument, at best. Oh, and we had decent seats, 15 rows back, to the left of the mixing desk.

Even the "T(ori) & Bö(sendorfer)" segment, where it's just her and her piano didn't sound that great. The piano sounded distorted and might as well have been a Casio rather than a grand piano. I say this after having gone to nearly every tour of hers in the last decade. I think the times I've been bummed with the sound were the times she had a full band, played in a hockey arena, or both. For contrast, see the Bank of America Pavilion show two years ago, which is one of the Official Bootlegs from 2005, and sounded great, despite some airplanes making it in the PA (but not in the released bootleg mix that I could tell).

Highpoints were Jackie's Strength (You're SO not a fucking virgin!), Cornflake Girl, and when she was riffing on Miss Massachusetts, who was in attendance and got a meeting before the show. In fact, one thing that I'd built up in my head which I thought was going to be really cool, was as she and Miss Mass were chatting back and forth, she said the song was "a new one for me", and since she plays a lot of covers, and plunked out what sounded like part of the beginning of it, I thought she was going to play Bank of Boston Beauty Queen by The Dresden Dolls. That would have been funny, if obscure, but it was fun nonetheless. Holy run-on sentence. Don't care, late. Fun show, didn't sound great, had a good time.