REVIEW: Ani DiFranco, Up Up Up Up Up Up (Righteous Babe)
- Jon Steltenpohl
Ani DiFranco's latest album Up Up Up Up Up Up takes Ani DiFranco to the next plateau in her career. Whether you like it or not, she continues down the same path she toyed with on Little Plastic Castles; a mish-mash of poingant commentary and quirky performance art. Singular intensity has given way to fragmented playfulness. The horns have been hauled away with a Wurlitzer dragged in, and DiFranco finally seems to be happy to be in a studio with a band.
Where Little Plastic Castles was somewhat tentative in its ventures, Up takes big steps. Half the tracks are fairly solid, straightforward tunes which are touching, but fairly low on the DiFranco intensity scale. The rest fall into strange categories of varying degrees of songs, poems, and abstract musical art. DiFranco takes the enthusiasm she had "remixing" the legendary Utah Phillips into the 21th century and applies it to her own sound. Echoes and loops fight for attention while the trademark staccato blasts of the past are muted with a little R&B and an undercurrent of funky vibes.
"Angel Food" and "Hat Shaped Hat" are poem songs with distorted vocals that bounce back and forth off the ropes and trade body slams and clotheslines as they wrestle for control of the sound board. While they sound like they were a lot of fun to record and create, the finished product still shows the rough edges of the studio jam sessions they were mined from. As such, their impact isn't nearly as remarkable as Little Plastics Castles' "Pulse." Not that either track is serious on any level. They are, in fact, exuberant and silly. "Angel Food" ends with an audio attack by Andy Stochansky on the "pocket Cajun" which is both entirely goofy and exceedingly annoying.
Your mileage will vary on these tracks, and versions of the same theme seep to the other tracks in the album. "Virtue" stalks and pounces like the dark cat DiFranco paints herself as, but the vocal distortions sneaking around the shadows of the beat just don't increase the value of the song. DiFranco was much more intense when it was Ani vs. the world instead of the Ani Band.
In the middle road, DiFranco is finding interesting topics to write about which aren't soaked in personal agony. In "Everest", she sings of a trip to a gospel service with a friend whose silhoutte from a distance is "a lot like mine". "So I took a deep breath," reflects DiFranco of her arrival, "and became the white girl with the hair." But, by the end of the service, her heart is filled and her friendship focused. On the brilliant night as they walk and talk, "the moon was so beautiful that the ocean held up a mirror." DiFranco's imagery and focus are still as sharp as when she writes in turmoil even if the emotional impact to the listener isn't as strong. "Jukebox" and "Up up up up up up" are also solid songs musically, but, as with "Everest", the emotional tie-in just isn't there.
"Trickle Down" and "'Tis of Thee" tackle societal and political issues with some success. "Trickle Down" finds DiFranco at the bottom of a deep well of desperation as she describe the slow destruction of a town under Reagan's trickle down economic theory. Her guitar bubbles up through an eeiry reverb and her vocals are whispered from far below. It perfectly captures the feeling of being trapped with no one out there to hear you. "'Tis of Thee" is a mournful, plodding track of despair about drug use, poverty, and racism aimed at those who would "criminalize the symptoms while [they] spread the disease." "Why don't you just go ahead and turn of the sun?," pleads DiFranco, "'cause we'll never live long enough to undo everything they've done to you." It's an impassioned resignation that is framed perfectly by DiFranco's earnest performance.
The two best tracks on the album are the most personal and the most straightforward musically. "Angry Anymore" is a coming of age song. In it, DiFranco comes to terms with her broken home and forgives both her father and her mother. The banjo and accordian tinged intro feels a bit like a New Yorker's version of no depression music, but it doesn't distract from the song or the simple harmonies. "Come Away From It" is an 8 minute opus that is rapturous. DiFranco begs, pleads, and crys like a tortured diva. Over and over she pleads to her lover who's self destructing trying to find deeper and deeper highs. "Why don't you come away from it?", she challenges. Slowly her fear gives way to a slight hint of frustration at having "to put the training wheels back on your bike." Yet still she coaxes through the end.
Taken as a whole, Up doesn't really get you in the gut, doesn't bleed your emotions the way that DiFranco's breakthrough albums Dilate and Not a Pretty Girl did. In comparison, the pace is slow and subdued. Nearly plodding. When set along side the live versions of these songs, Up Up Up Up Up Up is nearly flacid. Given the incredible recordings on her live album, Living in Clip, DiFranco would do better to re-record these songs live. It's not that Up is a bad album or that the songs are lacking. On the contrary, it's pretty good. It's just that DiFranco has done so much better in the past and she performs these songs so much better in concert. Up Up Up Up Up Up is, like Little Plastic Castles, an album Ani fans will enjoy but not treasure.
