Audio By Carbonatix
Wouldn’t you know it; no sooner do we muse idly about the relative dearth of double-CD/triple albums of new material by women artists (review of godspeed you black emperor!’s Lift Your Skinny Fists Like Antennas to Heaven, October 5, 2000) than Ani DiFranco comes along with a double-disc collection of fresh material to outdate our carefully considered comments. Thankfully, when the music is this good, we’ll gladly eat our words.
Just for the moment (and meaning no disrespect), fie on all that DIY label, inspirational grrl-power hoo-ha. It’s long past time for DiFranco to be recognized as one of the most creative and gifted lyricists in contemporary rock music, and not a political agitprop. Like Paul Westerberg and Tom Waits, DiFranco possesses the singular gift of being able to tell you every damn thing you need to know about a character in the first four lines of a song. “Garden of Simple,” long a concert favorite and way overdue for album inclusion, illustrates it best: “Some crazy fucker carved a sculpture/Out of butter, and propped it up/In the middle of the Bonanza breakfast bar/And I am stuffing toast and sausage into my pockets/Under the sign that says ‘Grand Opening’/While my dog is waiting in the car.” Performed solo with only DiFranco’s instantly recognizable acoustic guitar accompaniment, the song starts in the middle of a furtive theft and careens back and forth through the messy details of the protagonist’s life: “Science chases money/And money chases its tail/And the best minds of my generation can’t make bail.”
It’s a familiar moment for DiFranco’s listeners, but it’s the sonic experiments on Revelling/Reckoning that are going to make this album her Songs in the Key of Life. Apparently recognizing that no amount of straightforward acoustic material could fill up two hours and do it interestingly, DiFranco pulls out most of the stops by working through a variety of genres and styles, and — no surprise here — she and her time-tested road band are more than up to snuff each time. In that sense, Revelling/Reckoning is similar to Dilate, her loose, album-length meditation on heterosexual love and sexual politics. But occasionally on Dilate DiFranco sounded too self-consciously experimental (as on her sample and tape-loop rendition of “Amazing Grace”). Here, by contrast, the long prep time spent with these songs on tour shows in every seam-tight number, so that even the potentially navel-gazing world music vibe on “Tamboritza Lingua” fits in perfectly between harder guitar numbers. And in a bow to tradition and true musical glory, old James Brown ace Maceo Parker even shows up to contribute horns to the leadoff track, “Ain’t That the Way,” a sleazy funk number that’s going to make narrow-minded hard-core folk fans pop a gasket.
The songs on Revelling/Reckoning are split about evenly between acoustic and full-band numbers, and the two discs provide something of a thematic distinction between narrative tales of fucked-up folks and introspective cuts in which DiFranco tries to find new ways to articulate eternal truths (as on “Old Old Song” and the achingly sad “School Night”). If you’re already a fan, you’ll know what DiFranco’s capable of; don’t let the length or the price tag make you think you’re rolling the dice. If you haven’t heard this yet, run, don’t walk.
