Anyone who has ever bothered to pick up a guitar is familiar with the pain of the instrument. I mean the actual physical pain in the fingertips that can throb for hours after you promise never to pick up the rotten thing again. Some people, through sheer determination and/or spiritual torment, continue to practice and develop calluses that only allow a dull ache to permeate the skin after especially long performances.
Then there are the select few, who strum the guitar with an irrational intensity, feverishly pressing the strings to the fret-board with white-knuckled force. Such has been the way of Ani Difranco. This is a woman who frequently wrapped her fingers in masking tape to maintain the integrity of her skin while performing. Difranco has always played hard, beating her songs from the instrument and singing with a voice possessed with a lucid anger that would scare the republican right out Alex Keaton.
But the past is the past, and maybe after umpteen albums over the past dozen years Difranco is sick of leaving it all on the table night after night, year after year. Her latest effort, “Evolve”, certainly seems to make a case for this possibility. Over the coarse of her last few records Difranco has left her forceful, complex acoustic playing behind, evolving into a jazzy, funky kind of groove. Put this record on and close your eyes and you can almost smell the smoke in the bottom floor lounge of the Downtown Marriott. It would be a complete image, except for the fact that Difranco’s perceptive and profound lyrics would catch you off guard, perhaps unsettling the cosmopolitan pleasantness of your green apple martini. Nobody will ever mistake the insightful lyrics of “Evolve” for eleventh grade poetry, or sappy soul shlop.
And there are a few tracks that still suggest rowdy and somber campfire confessionals. In tracks such as the title “Evolve”, and the political marathon “Serpentine”, Difranco’s whispering sincerity lies comfortably between the grooves of syncopated rhythms dealt out with her bare bones acoustic guitar. It’s at times like these that Ani Difranco still rises above the tide of many singer/songwriters, and by a very large margin in many cases.
There is growth and curiosity in this album. While the babe is still righteous and has the biceps to prove it, she’s wearing an evening gown now. So get some class and try to keep up.
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