According to the Righteous Babe Records official biography of Ani DiFranco, “She’s an outspoken feminist who doesn’t run from that particular f-word.” Well, if using the f-word doesn’t make you a paramount musician, I don’t know what does.
And now, to remove my tongue from my cheek and proceed with this review. Whoever wrote that description wasn’t nearly doing her proper justice. Ani DiFranco is a musical force to be reckoned with, a folk artist who aspires to and achieves new musical heights with each of her albums, of which there are 18 to date. However, her 19th effort, “Evolve,” does fall a little bit short of that self- precedent.
The album’s sound is like Rusted Root, Ella Fitzgerald and Sly and the Family Stone got together and somehow (I wouldn’t want to know) produced a beautiful bouncing baby. She uses her folk base and layers on jazz and funk licks and rhythms that merge together like a yummy salty-sweet PB’J sandwich. However, the album reminds me of the Lifetime channel: “Hey look! ‘The Golden Girls’ is on, followed by…’The Golden Girls’, followed by, um… ‘The Golden…Girls’…” Every episode is quality, but after a while, you wonder if anything else is on. On most of her other albums, like 1996’s “Dialate” for instance, she manages to make each song practically its own genre, yet they still fit like a puzzle by the end. “Evolve” is like jam session featuring 12 variations of the same fantastic song.
Fans actually got a taste of the album on DiFranco’s September 2002 release, “So Much Shouting, So Much Laughter.” It’s a double disc live album she produced concurrently with “Evolve,” on which she treats the audience to a listen of “Shrug” and “Welcome To:”, the seventh and last tracks, and arguably among the best on the album.
Other notable tracks are the bluesy acoustics of “Evolve,”the title track, and the joyously atavistic first track, “Promised Land.” Although both are very different from each other, no track is more different than the weakest of the bunch, “Serpentine.”
A standout track because of its length (ten and a half minutes, while the rest clock out at about four and a half), “At the end of that…I cried and cried”, Di Franco noted in an interview. I cried and cried too, but more for the irreversible damage I thought the song had committed on my ears. Her words are a slam-poetry like song about the disarray of today’s world and how we must weave through it (thus “Serpentine”). However, I think a more appropriate title would be “I do Lamaze Breathing Real Hard and Distract Myself from the Contractions by Singing this Song.” I know “She’s emoding, man!”, but seriously, you want to hand her an inhaler after listening. But aside from that every track is well, right on track.
A note to first time Ani listeners, however: although I think she’s one of the finest musicians in her field right now, she can be so politically charged she casts me out as quickly as she reeled me in. I listen to music for the escape and new sensations sound can evoke. I feel her unrequited-love songs are some of the sexiest out there; her self-reflection songs are deeply sympathetic. But for her, “politics and art are inseparable.” And at times, she’ll yank you back to reality so unpleasantly hard you’ll wake up with a bruise or two.
Politics aside, Ani DiFranco cares about the quality of her music, and it shows, both live and in the studio. And she cares just as much about her lyrics as her sound: both her sarcasm and sensual imagery paint plenty of pictures on their own. “Evolve” is full of both such lyrics. As a sample of the more sensual, “Cuz when I look at you I squint/You are that beautiful…I’m haunted by my illicit, explicit dreams/and I can’t really wake up/ so I just drift in between” she sings on “Slide.”
“Evolve” is out in stores on March 11th, and, again, while it’s not the best of her work, it’s still better than mostly everyone else in her genre. And though she’s not quite there yet, Ani DiFranco is letting us know that she intends to keep on growing, and not stop until she reaches her fullest potential.
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