Ani Difranco – Revelling/Reckoning
Ani DiFranco is truly an artist of her times: a folk musician desperately eager to break from genre constrictions, a mediated image she tries to control through songs, and a strong woman whose most identifiable gift might be vulnerability. Think of her as a new Walt Whitman, contradicting herself with “reluctant” poses on innumerable magazine covers.
Despite the disorder, the double-disc Revelling/Reckoning is DiFranco’s most assured, sustained studio work since 1996, when Dilate transformed her from coffeehouse bard into bona fide cult. Confidence manifests itself in “Ain’t That The Way”, the first song on Revelling, and she delivers the first lines — “I love you/And you love me” — with a straight-up groove she once wouldn’t even have attempted.
With fat bass, flute, horns, and Maceo Parker’s voice funkifying such basic statements, it’s clear DiFranco’s experimentation outside her signature acoustic boogies and ballads finally works. The oft-clumsy eclecticism of her last two albums, To The Teeth and Up Up Up Up Up Up, has developed into something more graceful. For example, the brass section DiFranco employed on her last tour — saxophonist Hans Teuber, trumpeter Shane Endsley — nearly ruined every performance with jerry-rigged arrangements; now they skate into the music, DiFranco evidently having figured out how to incorporate them.
The comparatively unsurprising lyrics feature the usual intertwined political and personal concerns, yet the musical variations throw the words into sharp relief. The rants against plastic culture and “teenage jerk” attitude filter anger and disgust through a resigned strumming tone in “Your Next Bold Move” and “Subdivision”.
The craft that DiFranco uses to guide these tracks is the defining characteristic of Reckoning, the more deliberately nuanced of the discs. In particular, her vocals evince a delicacy she’s merely touched upon before; the melancholy of breakup guilt in “School Night” and the unalloyed torching of “Revelling” are not so much expressions of fragile heartbreak as of determination to reconcile the pieces of the heart.
Of course, it’s tempting to interpret this subtlety as a kind of weakness, but it’s also ludicrously facile to do so. Revelling/Reckoning generates another Ani DiFranco contradiction: maturity strengthened by a still-youthful willingness to change.