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List Price: $16.98 | | Label: Righteous Babe
Salesrank: 13628
Released: August 8, 2006 |
| Our Price: $5.00 |
| Used Price: $2.20 |
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| Media: Audio CD |
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Reprieve Track Listing:
1. hypnotized
2. subconscious
3. in the margins
4. nicotine
5. decree
6. 78% H2O
7. millennium theater
8. half-assed
9. reprieve
10. a spade
11. unrequited
12. shroud
13. reprise
Editorial Review:
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.
Description of Reprieve:
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
Reprieve Reviews:
Return to original heart with a new twist on sound 
2009-08-12 - This album seems to me to represent a return to the subject matter that made Ani such a revolutionary songstress, while adopting a whole new level of skill and demonstrated mastery of the medium she employs to carry her message. Excellent spoken word track, top notch album overall.
Grows on you like fungus!!! 
2008-01-23 - Let's face it Ani Difranco is definetly an aquired taste musically. Most people are put off by her "women lib rants", her "quirky cartoon vocalizations", or her "hyper-caffeinated guitar strumming". If your a fan of folk or even singer songwriter fare you owe yourself a deep listen into her prolific body of work. Being somewhat familiar with her body of work I was immediately put back by the somberness of this album but after repeated listens this album really grew on me. This album is really reflective and really can't be appreciated in a more upbeat state of mind. This album is like a warm cup of coffee being cradled and sipped by someone living in cold dreary storm-drenched cabin in the pacific northwest. Given that example you should listen in the right atmosphere:perhaps a long lonely drive somewhere or a housecleaning session in solitude. I think you get the vibe now...
Anyways the album sounds like what an Ani Difranco trip-hop album might sound like but with the emphasis on more live instrumentation. The atmosphere is heavy and very visual. The lyrics and the ambient textures jump out at you at the cue of her voice. It's really not your standard album as much as it is more like a soundtrack for poems.
"Inside the margins" is probably one the most touching songs she's done maybe since "joyful girl" as it celebrates the splendor of life and the bewilderment of forgetting it. "Hypnotize" is probably one of the more clever songs about relationships that I've heard in a while; where she questions how her and someone else manage to stay together saying"maybe I had just enough pathos to keep you hypnotized..."
All in all I think this is great album sonically and lyrically and deserves several listens. This nothing like other Ani records and isn't really trying to throw bunch a hooks at you. Also the fact that it is somber makes it work because Ani's reserved delivery really lets the material shine musically and lyrically. I don't think Ani is mellowing out or loosing her bite because subtlety wasn't really ever her strong suit but on this album she is definetly developing it. I think she's on her way to making a really interesting album if she could fuse both of these elements....!!!!!!!!
Not her best 
2007-11-27 - I adore Ani but this album is not so great. It doesn't have as much of the syncopated rhythms that I'm so fond of in Ani's other music. The whole album is sort of monotone and the only lyrics that I find very poignant are those in "Unrequited". If you're going to buy a "new" Ani album, I'd definitely choose "Knuckle Down" over this one.
Ani at her most boring
2007-07-02 - One thing I always admired about Ani is that with each album she's not afraid to try something different. From her early coffee shop folk days to her jazzy period to now, one can never expect the same thing from our favorite Righteous Babe.
Unfortunately, Ani misses her mark on this album. Ani's a great lyricist, but here she focuses too much on the lyrics, leaving the melodies to be BORING! She plucks only a few notes on her guitar throughout the songs, as if she's only trying to create some background ambiance and nothing more. You'll enjoy the album more if you just read the lyrics and not listen to the CD at all...which is maybe what Ani wants you do to.
I would recommend you buy "Knuckle Down," "Evolve," or "Not a Pretty Girl" instead.
At her best
2007-03-21 - Reprieve is Difranco's best work yet. She is at her poetical and musical prime. Songs like "Millennium Theater" are a call for Americans to get out of their cocoons and wake up to what's going on with a corrupt corporate controlled government. Not a filler song on this one. The CD artwork is superb as well.
