DiFranco’s Reprieve predictable, for better or for worse

Originally published in the Lamron (10/1/06)

Ani DiFranco opens her new record, Reprieve, with the now-nearly-cliché introductory line that sounds as if she is in mid-sentence and the listener is just now entering the conversation. “So that’s how you found me,” she declares in the starting track, “Hypnotized” – a sonically sparse folk item in a mellow tone, and also not a good representation of the album as a whole.

There is a fundamental problem in young folk singers like her, in that the niche they fall into is so inflexible, listeners know what to expect from them before they even pop in the disc. DiFranco doesn’t quite avoid this pitfall entirely, but her spin certainly does add new flavor to the typical folk-rock sound. She has a voice that is both innocent and courageous, and her acoustic guitar dances resiliently from track to track, managing most of the time to sound unsullied and authentic. This helps minimize critical dismissal of the album as just another elaboration on Joni Mitchell and Joan Baez.

DiFranco definitely has a musical theme running here. In front of the reverberating twang of her guitar and the rushing sway of the bass, she sounds as if she’s singing to the raindrops running down the window on a stormy afternoon, and she has the sensibility to make the occasional additions of harpsichord, organ, and string instruments sound subtle and appropriate. This atmosphere works best on the second track, “Subconscious,” which has certain roots in the off-kilter intro of Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young’s “Déjà Vu.”

While DiFranco sets the stage for some very good folk rock, she runs into problems with her delivery, particularly when she tries to pull off the “tough girl” image; her snarly crooning almost always comes off sounding more like a sad Avril Lavigne clone. Luckily for her, there is a general trend of placidness on the album that doesn’t call for that style too much. But that doesn’t explain some unforgivably pedestrian imagery in her writing, like with “In the Margins,” where she sings, “You are a rare bird/The kind I wouldn’t mind/Writing in the margins of my books” (which is too bad, because it mars a particularly nice acoustic melody). Even worse, the spoken poetry of the title track fails miserably at making any sort of impression on the listener.

She has a tendency – the laughably-titled “78% H20” comes to mind – to overwhelm the listener with forced subtext. And what would a DiFranco record be without reoccurring messages about sexism, feminism, and individuality. Reprieve does an admittedly formidable job of avoiding the estrogenical overload of some of her alternative-rock contemporaries but can’t help at times from falling into the sticky stereotype of the female folk singer.

Ultimately, it all goes back to that fundamental problem DiFranco faces before she even begins recording: how do you pleasantly surprise your audience? There are really no surprises on Reprieve; it will probably please the fans that have followed her since her self-titled debut over ten years ago, but does little to reveal the artist as much more than “just another face” in the folk-rock crowd.