Ani DiFranco - Red Letter Year - 1988 (iTunes - Amazon)
Dammit, Ani. Just as I was ready to completely write you off you go and do something like this.
Red Letter Year is good. It's the best she's done since Little Plastic Castles. It's also the first album in 10 years that SOUNDS like something that was made by someone who made that album and the ones that preceded it.
To those who say that motherhood and happiness have had a negative effect on DiFranco's music, I say, pishaw! She wears overt happiness as well as she wears (or wore) anger.
Ani's music has seemed aimless and meandering the last 10 years. Hooking up with her lifemate, Mike Napolitano, has brought the MUSIC back. There are actual, dare I say it, songs here.
The opening, Red Letter Year, is haunting and mellow but incisive and edgy and the album just gets better.
All This actually rocks with ominous fury. Present/Infant is such a pleasant examination of motherhood from a woman who once pined with longing and jealousy so many years ago at the woman who was coiffing herself for a man.
The N'Orleans Jazz of the Red Letter Year Reprise is such an ode to her new hometown but also shows a zest for life that has been missing for so fucking long.
Ani DiFranco has grown up. She's happy...finally!
And she's allowed, gulp, production. Good, layered production.
The glee in the woman in love (without man, daughter, whomever) who is "smiling underneath" is a welcome visitor after those so many years of depression.
Sure Red Letter Year falls into a miasma of repetition by the end. But, who cares? It's better than so much else out there. And it's just nice to see that Ani hasn't used up all her talent or traded it in for Sunday Brunch Music.
Grade B
A Side: Red Letter Year, Emancipated Minor
BlindSide: Present/Infant, Smiling Underneath, The Atom
DownSide: Star Matter
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Now playing: Ani DiFranco - Emancipated Minor
via FoxyTunes
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