A Piano Box

January 29, 2007

!(inset)http://www.thudfactor.com/images/tori.jpg!

Arrived today: A Piano: The Collection, a Tori Amos box set from Rhino. I haven’t listened to it yet, but the package design seems to mimic the attitude of some of her later work — that is, I think it’s designed to infuriate.

The track listing is excellent, which is why I bought it. It’s a 5-CD set and the entire first disc is devoted to _Little Earthquakes_ and includes alternate takes and tracks which were held off the original album for god only knows what A&R reason. The other discs have a plethora of demos, remixes, and unreleased material as well as some (not nearly all) — of her released material.

p(imgcenter). !http://www.thudfactor.com/album_sparklines/littleearthquakes.gif! Little Earthquakes

Back to the packaging, though. The box is about the size of an old-fashioned CD longbox (remember those?) but it has a large plastic replica keyboard on top. About two octaves worth of full-scale 3D piano keys. Eyecatching, but try fitting that on your CD rack. This keyboard hinges up from the cardboard box to reveal an inconveniently long but short hardcover book.

The hardcover has a lot of nice photos, but it’s the length of the box and landscape-oriented. Opening it makes it twice as long and very, very unweildy — you pretty much have to set this one on a table rather than hold it in your hands.

Underneath the book are the five discs in cardboard CD cases. All I can say is thank god for DAPs, because I’d hate to keep reaching into this box fumbling for discs. The cardboard sleeves have another nice annoying touch — identifiers on the front and back, but nothing on the spine. So if you choose to put the discs on a CD rack, not only will the fragile cardstock cases get filthy in a hurry, but you won’t be able to tell which disc you have in your hand until you take it off the shelf.

Typical Tori. Everything else has to accommodate her.

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