Tori Amos’s mannered singing and unapologetically gorgeous songs have gone out of fashion since she burst onto the scene in 1992. Neither is her Women’s Studies viewpoint as new as it was when her cover of Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit” revealed the song also to be an affecting ballad. To her credit, eccentricity, melodicism and feminism come as naturally to Amos as her green eyes, and her seventh full-length album is her most fully realized yet. Against gleaming, meltingly smooth arrangements, she crafts iconic tales, vague but rich with resonance and imagery. She sketches her lyrics with brief, powerful strokes, evoking in a few words the fallen woman of “Amber Waves,” who went “from ballet class to a lap dance,” and the murder victim of “Carbon.” She adopts the stance of a weary pal on “Don’t Make Me Come to Vegas,” about a friend who seems to be in a dangerous situation. Her elliptical approach continues even on the poignant “I Can’t See New York,” whose narrator is stuck inside a doomed hijacked airplane. The songs are one after another of Amos’s patented ultra-emotive ballads, driven by portentous piano chords that swell and crash over lush orchestration. As it meanders through regional landscapes, conjured more through poetic implication than blunt description, Scarlet’s Walk unites the darker threads of women’s experiences with those of other outcasts: gay boys on “Taxi Ride,” African-Americans on “Virginia” and Native Americans on the a capella “Wampum Prayer.” Uncommonly rich and unfashionably gynocentric, Scarlet’s Walk makes the personal universal, using the stories of women lost, left and unseen to chart a map of the American psyche.