Native Invader

Native Invader isn’t as confrontational as Amos’ early work, and as a result, once or twice the album takes a brief detour into coffeeshop cliché. But even the sillier lyrical content is elevated by Amos’ talent for arrangement and distinctive snippets of melody.

The strength of this album, and the 14 that precede it, is the immense healing and soothing found in the sheer beauty of Amos’ vocal delivery.

Her marriage of musical gentleness and raw despair takes her to a whole new level. [Nov 2017, p.104]

It adds up to one of the most purposeful full-length statements in her quarter-century career.

Amos may never again sound the way she did in the ‘90s, nor should she feel the need to. She confidently wields her status as a veteran rock performer, dispensing wisdom and evoking complex, unspeakable emotions with inimitable skill.

Native Invader stands tall with its own vital voice and energy, alluding to beloved touchstones from throughout Amos' oeuvre while remaining fully of its time.

Like the best of Amos’ work over the past 20 years, what makes Native Invader exceptional is its complexity: songs are laid out like puzzles, ready for the subjectivity of the listener, with no obvious interpretations.

The album is spacious and enveloping even as it warns of horrors down the line.

Native Invader is not one of Tori’s sexier albums, nor is it as playful as she’s demonstrated herself capable of being. But it’s strong and unwavering in its commitment to being muse-driven and unafraid.

As ever with Amos’ more recent albums, it’s a bit overlong and some songs, especially in the album’s mid-section, float by without ever making much of an impression. ... Yet when Tori is on form, she still sounds as vital and exciting as she did 25 years ago.

Yes, Native Invader is an effectual statement by an artist who has built her career on making them, but at times it feels a little restrained in its tone compared to some of her most memorable work.

Native Invader is a step back from Unrepentant Geraldines, but still boasts enough quality to suggest that she has another stellar album in her.

Across its 15 tracks, there are moments of greatness: Reindeer King is a swelling piano ballad about grief that boasts an ambient underside, while the aforementioned Up the Creek fuses a countryfied guitar loop with ominous strings, electro beats and backing vocals from Amos’s teenage daughter, Tash, to create a multifaceted soundscape. ... However, much of this album is forgettable.

With such weighty subject matter, and with some own personal trauma influencing the record, it’s sadly lacking in bite or overall attack.

When Amos eschews her band in favor of barer piano-and-vocal arrangements—as on the contemplative “Breakaway,” the surprisingly reverent “Climb,” and the lush “Mary's Eyes,” a mournful plea to the gods to reverse Amos's mother's aphasia--Native Invader fulfills the promise of its stunning opener.

he languid mid-tempo tones are certainly pleasant and, on the likes of Wildwood, sometimes capture a sense of achingly beautiful melancholia. Still, you’re left longing for Amos’s social commentary to be laced with just a little more venom to truly conjure the state of upheaval in the world.