Revelling/Reckoning
As she has become both indie icon and industry force, Ani  DiFranco has grown more unpredictable, savvy, and restless with every  release. On this sumptuously packaged double set, DiFranco often pours  her brutally personal and political images into summery, horn-based  jazz arrangements--Maceo Parkereven  takes one gorgeously funky sax solo--and yet somehow still keeps the  focus on her own minimalist guitar and vulnerable, emotionally  strung-out voice. Her jittery, jazzy phrasing deconstructs the pleasure and  poison of her lyrics, so that even vicious lines like "our culture is  just a roughneck / teenage jerk / with a bottle of pills / and a bottle  of booze" resonate beyond easy condemnation. This is a dark, brooding,  but ultimately cathartic work of confessional art. On nearly every  track, DiFranco pursues the kind of defenseless honesty and personal  vision that few other performers today would dare.--Roy Kasten