Professional ratings
Review scores
Source	Rating
AllMusic
The A.V. Club	(favourable)
Entertainment Weekly	B
NME	(5/10)
Nude as the News	(favourable)
PopMatters	(6/10)
Q	11/1999 (p.116)
Rolling Stone

To Venus and Back, the fifth album released by singer and songwriter Tori Amos, is a two-disc album set including a studio album and a live album. The first disc, titled Venus: Orbiting, features eleven original songs that find Amos experimenting heavily in electronica. It spawned the singles "Bliss", "1000 Oceans", "Glory of the 80's" (Australia, the United Kingdom, and Europe only), and "Concertina" (US only). The second disc, Venus Live: Still Orbiting, is a thirteen-track album compiling live tracks recorded from her Plugged '98 tour. This is the first official live release of Amos's career.

To Venus and Back, which began life as a proposed B-sides album, is sparser both in production and arrangement than From the Choirgirl Hotel, but is similar to its predecessor in that it features overt electronica influences and a relatively subdued piano sound. The album finds Amos's voice and piano subverted in a sonic maze of electronic washes and effects, and some songs, notably "Juárez" and the epic "Dātura" are largely built around these effects. Topics covered on the album include unsolved murdered female maquiladora workers in Ciudad Juárez on the US–Mexico border, hallucinogenic plants, and Napoleon Bonaparte.

In November 1999, Tori Amos was quoted by Pulse Magazine as saying that this record says a lot about the shadows and the shadow world.

The studio disc of To Venus and Back is recognized as one of Amos's most experimental yet melodic, and received mixed reviews. Some critics praised its originality, innovation and unpredictable song structures, with one reviewer describing the album as having, "some of the best vocals of her career, embedded in modern, special-effects-laden soundscapes that move from electronica-spiced piano pop and hip-hop to ambient space music", while others begrudged the album because of its overuse of electronic instruments and lack of Amos's trademark simplistic sound, most present on albums such as Little Earthquakes (1992) and Under The Pink (1994).

The album received two 2000 Grammy Award nominations: Best Female Rock Vocal Performance for "Bliss" and Best Alternative Music Album.

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Wikipedia