Ani DiFranco Album

Every new album from Ani DiFranco gives listeners a reason to get excited about music all over again, and her latest, Reprieve, is certainly no exception. Across 12 tracks, DiFranco ignites more of her signature blend of poetry, politics and musicianship.

Ani and touring bassist Todd Sickafoose are the only two players on the new album - something you'd never guess from it's rich and detailed sound. In addition to the usual array of acoustic and electric guitars, Ani can be heard on keyboards, drums, and other instruments, while Todd contributes bass, wurlitzer, pump organ, piano and "fakey-bakey" trumpet and strings.

The album was tracked in her New Orleans studio in early 2005 during a break in her usually heavy touring schedule. Forced to leave the master recordings behind before Hurricane Katrina, she drove back into the city to retrieve them just three days after the levees broke. From there she headed back to overdub in her hometown of Buffalo with whatever instruments happened to be on hand.

Between the evacuation and the time off the road, Ani found herself concentrating on the process of recording to a degree she had never done before, and the resulting album is the clearest demonstration yet of her talents as a producer. Unconstrained by the pressures of touring, she was able to take her time with the record, and the end result is an overall sound that is clear and succinct.

While not intended to be taken as a concept album, the songs on Reprieve do provide a cohesive picture of what’s been on Ani’s mind during turbulent times on the personal, cultural, and global front.

Ani describes Reprieve as rooted in the Crescent City, and there’s a direct reference to that town in the album’s centerpiece, "Millennium Theater." The line "New Orleans bides her time" in the middle of this scathing critique of the current Republican regime might sound like a response to Hurricane Katrina, but in fact the song was written well before the disaster that has devastated the city, about a crisis that took no one but the presidential administration by surprise. Like just about everything else on Reprieve, "Millennium Theater" finds Ani speaking her mind, singing from her heart, and playing music like her life—like all of our lives—depended on it.

Review - Amazon.com :

Given these tumultuous times, one would expect Ani DiFranco to confront strife head-on, but on this, her 18th album, she tunnels beneath the headlines toward deeper emotional, psychic, and institutional conflicts and causes. She begins by channeling her inner Joni Mitchell, pouring out a quartet of jazzy confessions lightly dusted with electronica, musique concrete, and keyboard drone, but urged forward by Todd Sickafoose's warm acoustic bass. His throbbing, be-bop lines are this spare but somehow atmospheric album's musical soul. As DiFranco's voice bobs and weaves around those rhythms, the personal poetry makes the politics hit harder--and vice versa. She celebrates marginalia and makes peace with a world in flux. She conveys the heat of across-the-café infatuations and grows anxious over her subconscious desires. When she locks her sights on contemporary culture, she sends a scattershot spray against celebrity cults, network news, biotechnology, Yucca Mountain, stolen elections and, of course, patriarchy. But she's a gifted enough poet and musician to keep the album from collapsing into radical rhetoric and psychobabble. The spoken-word title track begins in Hiroshima and ends in a declaration that feminism is not about equality but about "reprieve"--an amnesty from fear and hate, in other words, and an affirmation of life. In the context of a death-driven culture, her decision to bear children, "to split herself in two," becomes the most "radical thing you can do." None of her manifestos, however, would ring true if it weren't for her imaginative, even playful singing and her ever-more accomplished acoustic guitar playing, sometimes classically graceful, sometimes purely urgent. --Roy Kasten

Customer review - 2006-08-13

- Pretty, Artistic, Somber

The austere cover image of a half-dead tree from the bombing of Nagasaki serves as a pretty good metaphor for this album--spartan and downbeat. To my ears the music falls somewhere between the simplicity of Knuckle Down and the experimentalism of Educated Guess.

I was a little worried when I learned the songs were recorded and self-produced at her home studios in New Orleans and Buffalo. Her DIY album Educated Guess got a bit out of hand with the odd vocal experiments. But Reprieve is steadier going. The production quality is excellent and she never fails to come up with interesting and varied acoustic guitar tones as well as some cool ambient electronica. And the vocals... well those are still Ani, if a little toned-down. A number of songs are delivered in the plaintive and earnest tones she reserves for her more depressive songs: "Hypnotized" and "Nicotine" are examples. Some are more in the idiosyncratic style she developed on Educated Guess--featuring the occasional strange harmony. But if you're a fan of the truly feisty delivery she is so famous for, you won't find much of it here. She lets loose during the last half of "Decree," perhaps just to remind us she still has it in her, but as a whole that's not what this album is about.

She does include the requisite poetry reading--this time with a whole-tone scale guitar accompaniment that gives an unsettling feeling. It doesn't really work so well, but I'll confess I've always found Ani's poetry reading tedious, in part because of the annoying wigger/beat-poet accent she tends to assume.

[...] I find the CD quite down in spirit overall. It's listenable for sure, but not really what I'm looking for. Ani has had many different periods over her (now lengthy) career; personally I prefer her lively ensemble work on the Reveling/Reckoning and Evolve albums. I'd love to see her go back to working with a great backup band again.

Customer review - 2006-08-18

- Redemption

I give this album five stars because Ani has redeemed herself. The other reviewer that said this one blows Knuckle Down out of the water is right. If you like Ani as I do, you need to get this album. It's the perfect blend of the old and the new. Her guitar playing on this one is reminiscent of some of her early stuff as well as some of the new ones. I would definitely say that Reprieve is one of her best albums in recent years.

Customer review - 2006-08-09

- Back to basics

I have been listening to the songs on the RBR site for a month or so now, to get a feel for how this new album was going to sound. I wasn't sure what to expect. I didn't really care for Educated Guess (although, I much prefer her live versions on the official bootlegs). Nor did I like much of Knuckle Down. I went to see Ani a few weeks ago here in Edmonton (that's in Canada for those of you who are not familiar). She was amazing, and she sang lots from the new album. The last time I saw her, was in Portland, ME. I drove 6 hrs in freezing rain, from New Brunswick (Canada) to see her. She had a lot of brass instrumentation with her, and even though I really liked Revelling/Reckoning, I am not a fan of the "jazz" sounds. So for me, this is a nice welcomed return to the basic sounds of the acoustic guitar that I love!! I love the lyrics- as usual she is a master poet. I only wish I could use the english language the way she does.

So rambling aside, I really recommend this new album. Even though I refer to it as a return to basics, it isn't like anything she's released before. Ani is forever morphing, yet keeping so much about her the same. Isn't that why we keep coming back for more?

Customer review - 2006-11-02

- Ani DiFranco's "Blue" album

Ani DiFranco comes around for her second album of 2006 (after the "Carnegie Hall" live album earlier this year), ever prolific as she is. Many of her albums have a musical twist to it (solo acoustic, or full band, or in concert, etc.), and with "Reprieve" Ani goes full Joni Mitchell "Blue" mode, with great results.

On "Reprieve" (13 tracks, 47 min.), Ani is musically accompanied primarily by an acoutic/fretless stand-up bass and the atmosphere is of an intimate setting in which Ani sings about her current worries of the day, albeit with slightly lesser political overtones than on many of her other albums. It's hard to point out "highlights" as such, as the songs flow pretty much from one into another, and it's not like there are "hits" on this collection. But my own personal favorite tracks include "Subconscious", "Decree", and "Millenium Theatre". I couldn't help but think back of Joni Mitchell's "Blue" album when hearing this one.

Ani DiFranco's output is amazing. Not counting live albums, this is her 15th studio album in 17 years. In this day and age, when a lot of artists take 2, 3, 4 years between albums, Ani keeps at it. And the amazing thing is that, more often than not, she delivers quality, even in all the quantity. "Reprieve" will not be the most important or most successful album of the year, but it certainly stands in its own right.

Customer review - 2006-10-07

- Another masterpiece!

It seems Ani Difranco is getting better and better as she grows up. This particular record is mellow, deep, thought provoking and musically brilliant.

This time she mixes personal and political inside the songs, and she presents her own personal view on human nature, wars, Enron/Yucca Mountain/and other American issues, patriarchy, feminism and much much more. The music is outstanding as ever, the lyrics even more clever and her voice simply rocks.
The overall atmosphere is quiet and calm, but the message is one of her strongest: only when we'll have fully accepted our "feminine half" (both inside everyone and more generally in the society), we could experience some reprieve from our day to day drama.

List of Ani DiFranco albums

Ani DiFranco Album - Reprieve