So Much Shouting, So Much Laughter
Ani Difranco
(Righteous Babe)
Although some may accuse Ani Difranco of recycling her old songs, So Much Shouting, So Much Laughter—her first live album in five years—is anything but a boring collection of old material. Irreverent, political, lively, intelligent and witty, it suffers no boring moments.
The two discs of the double album are called “Stray Cats” and “Girls Singing Night.” “Stray Cats” consists of some of her more standard concert fare, in terms of both music and in-between-the-songs antics. The disc begins with “Swan Dive,” an energetic and intense song. Upon her first strum of the guitar, however she injects a bit of humor, saying, “I don’t know why the fuck I play acoustic guitars. I hate that acoustic guitar sound.”
“Girls Singing Night” consists of Difranco’s more serious work, reflective of her radically liberal political leanings and her feminist principles. With “Self-evident,” she wanders through her own style into the realms of both beat and slam poetry. She gives her response to the Sept. 11 attacks among other things, most memorably claiming that “George W. Bush is not President.”
In spite of their separate themes, the two discs and the songs that make them up flow seamlessly into one another, effectively conjuring the illusion that the listener is actually at a concert. The band is brilliant and entirely in accord with Difranco’s intense and jazzy guitar playing style, while she fearlessly delivers her no-nonsense, thought-provoking lyrics.
Difranco revels in the energy of her enthusiastic crowds; she feeds off of it. This album proves that, as much as we may love her studio work, Difranco is, in essence, a live performer. Only when she is on stage in front of a mass of adoring fans can she truly achieve her full potential, and when she does, it is well worth listening to.
Trinity: Past Present & Future
Slum Village
(Capitol)
Taking hip hop heads back to the days of the Native Tongue Collective, Slum Village delivers Trinity, an album which shows a marked improvement in lyrical skills since their debut album. The Detroit-based hip-hop group was originally comprised of two rappers, T3 and Baatin, and producer/DJ Jay Dee who produced head-bobbing beats for such legendary groups as A Tribe Called Quest. Jay Dee has since departed the trio, but appears on Trinity to bless the album with a few well-produced tracks such as “Let’s.”
With the addition of a third MC, Trinity is a formidable and substantive hip hop album with intelligent lyrics, characterized by running metaphors and conceits. In the catchy single, “Tainted,” Slum Village demonstrates a seamless bond between lyric, flow, idea and beats. Baatin discusses the problems in the hip hop industry with lyrical dexterity: “Scandal love, cause love full of scandal / . . .Well it’s the same tainted love in the music business / People they lose they brain just to get up in this / Let’s be a star for day, everything in life is just OK.” He connects this scenario to the T3’s earlier verse of a love between a man and a woman tainted and gone sour.
As the first single, “Tainted” baits listeners; however, it is debatable whether the full length album can successfully reel them in. Trinity suffers from momentary weaknesses. Consisting of 17 tracks, two intros and three interludes, the album suffers from repetition and lack of depth at points. “Hoes” could have been omitted for lack of creativity and originality, as could others. There are several solid tracks on the album that would have stood stronger alone. Instead the extra foliage shrouds the album’s best songs and by the time you reach track 8, you find yourself skipping backwards through tracks to get back to “Tainted.”
The Safest Place
Invisible Downtown
Invisible Downtown is an American band of the old-fashioned REM school. Their lyrics are full of locale-specific imagery and stories of cruel women; one song even name-checks “The Great Gatsby.” There is little room for Radiohead-style navel-inspection in their power-pop broadside. “Power-pop” is an unfortunate term for anything except a large bubblegum balloon, but such are the vagaries of music terminology. Luckily, Invisible Downtown’s debut The Safest Place is one of the strongest arguments for the term’s redemption. The undeniable songwriting talent of guitarists Joseph S. Bell ’03 and Michael J. Palmer ’03 is perhaps the most standout element of the album’s 11 tracks. But the writing is underscored by a musical and technical proficiency that gives the album a maturity beyond their relatively limited exposure, which has nonetheless earned them two online awards for unsigned bands.
The songs are artfully constructed, ranging from the introspective “My Sins” to the teasingly jazzy intro of “Before You Met Me.” Bell and Palmer’s guitar work is unaffected and terse, neither giving in to indie-style chord pounding nor dissolving into noodling solos. That said, album-opener “Green Eyes” boasts a yearning solo that might make the Edge proud. Matthew J. Kamen ’03 provides lithe basslines that mostly remain tied to the bass drum of Travis M. Beamish ’04, delivering a potent kick.
However, on “My Sins,” an ear-grabbing potential single, Kamen steps into the limelight with a bassline more punchy and funky than anything the listener has a right to expect from a run-of-the-mill pop song. Clearly this is more than just run-of-the-mill.
Blane’s voice might not stand out in a crowd of aspiring rock bands, but he makes effective and powerful use of it, including a delicate, whispery falsetto on “Shadow of a Doubt.” On “The World I See,” possibly the best track on the album, his rich voice is complemented by Johanna N. Paretzky ’03 as the song builds into a raging excoriation: “A perverion, a perversion, a mirror version of yourself / You hate me, but you know I’m not the first.”
A word to the wise: grab a copy of their self-released album while you can. You’ll kick yourself when you hear them on the radio a couple of years from now.
