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Grade: B+
CD • "Night of Hunters" is the album 48-year-old Tori Amos was born to make.
This is the Peabody Conservatory of Music-trained pianist's first release on a classical music label, and is her first album recorded acoustically, relying solely on her vocals and piano skills (along with an orchestra). The album is a song cycle based on compositions from Chopin, Schubert and Bach that tells the story of a couple torn apart and a woman's search to find herself.
She enlists her 11-year-old daughter to sing on four tracks, and somehow, it works, just as the entire album works, as Amos skips the gimmicks that have marred her later works and returns to the raw emotion and power of earlier songs such as "Yes, Anastasia" and "Winter."