REVIEW: Ani DiFranco, Little Plastic Castle (Righteous Babe)
- Jon Steltenpohl
Ani DiFranco has a small problem. She's almost happy (the bio calls it "lighthearted".) Having conquered her feminist demons, found love, and graced the covers of umpteen magazines, who can blame her for easing off on the gut wrenching, wound bearing lyrics that endeared her as a critic's darling and a fan's obsession. The album cover is the first give away. It's a brilliant, happy blue with a little plastic goldfish castle, bright orange aquarium rocks, and DiFranco's goofy mug plastered on the body of a goldfish. Not exactly the thick, obscured portraits of her last few covers. Look at it wrong, and you might actually see a little smile pursing her lips.
Found within Little Plastic Castle is a quieter, gentler side of Ani DiFranco than fans of her past few albums might be expecting. Her sarcasm and wit are still present, but the intensity is set down a few notches. On Little Plastic Castle, DiFranco gives us the poet inside her. The songs are sometimes nothing more than tapestries behind her verses, and she even goes as far as including a 14 minute track of free-form music and words called "Pulse".
"Pulse" is beautiful and mesmerizing. It's a Kafka-esque ode to a self-destructing lover which finds DiFranco mouthing hoarsely "i thought: i would offer you my pulse, i would give you my breath." The music is cool and jazzy. A lazy trumpet plays over the silent surges of the repeating acoustic guitar line like the wandering thoughts of a sleepless, moonlit night. The lyrics are contemplative and wise, melancholy and hopeless. "We lie in our beds and our graves," sings DiFranco, "unable to save ourselves from the quaint tragedies we invent...".
So maybe she's not so happy. But there's a new perspective on this album. For the most part, everyone else seems screwed up, and it's DiFranco giving them a piece of her mind. In the bruised and tender "Independence Day", DiFranco takes back a lover and pleads, "you can't leave me here / now that you're back / you'd better stay this time / cuz you say the coast is clear / but you say that all the time". In "Glass House", she tells the world, "if you think you know what I'm doing wrong / you're gonna have to get in line / but for the purposes of this song / let's just say i am doing fine." And for all of the pundits who comment on her ever changing fashion sense, DiFranco pokes a sarcastic jab in the title track. "Quick," she jabs, "someone call the girl police and file a report".
But it's not just the lyrical perspective that's different on Little Plastic Castles. DiFranco experiments more in the studio this time around. This is the first album where she sounds like she felt comfortable recording her songs. "Little Plastic Castles" features a horn section which recalls the Mighty Mighty Bosstones at half speed, and "Deep Dish" brings back the horns for a bouncing, experimental piece that is reminiscent of Suzanne Vega's departure from acoustic folk a few years back. "As Is" finds DiFranco singing calmly to a quiet little tune and bending her voice around the title phrase like a pretzel.
Little Plastic Castle is exactly what you'd expect from Ani DiFranco in that it's different than any of her previous work. Unlike a major label musician forced to put out a carbon copy of their last album, DiFranco's individualist tendencies are unbounded. There are a few familiar tunes like "Loom" and a studio version of "Gravel", but the songs are first and foremost poems set to music. They're engaging to listen to, but they don't always follow the tidy verse-chorus-verse pattern.
All of which makes Little Plastic Castle an album that probably won't make it onto your local alternative radio station, but will make it to the discerning fan's CD player. If she was with a major label, such an album would be a disaster for the record execs. Little Plastic Castle may not be the logical follow-up to Dilate and Living in Clip, but DiFranco's sold more than a million albums doing things her own way, and there's no reason for her to change now. Little Plastic Castle represents just another intriguing evolution in DiFranco's no-compromise career.
