Ani Difranco

Educated Guess

(Righteous Babe)

Depending on how you count them, Educated Guess is Ani Difranco’s twentieth album in less than 15 years. This is her first entirely solo record and the result is an album that takes Difranco’s trenchant, self-revelatory style and folds it over onto itself, producing music so intimate it would be uncomfortable, were it not for Difranco’s wry delivery. Spoken word poetry is woven into the album, giving it the feel of an open-mic coffeeshop after everyone else has gone home. Politics is unsurprisingly omnipresent, ranging from the subtle (“Behold breathlessly the sight, how a raging river of tears cut a grand canyon of light”) to the not-so subtle (“Why can’t all decent men and women call themselves feminists…out of respect… for those who fought for this?”).

But the album’s most striking element is its dense, chromatic musical textures. Guess may be some of Difranco’s most opaque work yet, full of tense, unsettling suspended chords that never quite resolve. There are no ballads like “32 Flavors” or angry acoustic diatribes. The prevailing mood is desolate and intensely introspective, as only Difranco can be. On the standout track “Bliss Like This,” Difranco chills out long enough for a jazzy quasi-love song in which she is as concerned with herself as she is with her lover: “Besides every time I see you it just forces me to look at myself.” Many of Difranco’s other albums are more accesible, but for those who like seeing where her mind wanders to when she’s alone, Educated Guess may be the closest one can get to the Sphinx-like Ani.

—Andrew R. Iliff

John Vanderslice

Cellar Door

(Barsuk)

John Vanderslice sums up his musical range in just the first three songs of his latest full-length, and it goes something like this: melodramatically driven fuzzed-out faux-blues, electronic melodramatic pounding and piano ballads (melodramatic). On Cellar Door, Vanderslice combines and recombines these elements to find distinct directions for his sad-sack male songwriter’s backing band to explore. The result is meticulously beautiful. But over each unique instrumental backdrop comes that same mono-stylistic voice that Vanderslice can’t seem to outgrow. His intensely sincere, melodic moan pushes already overwrought lyrics to a point that will have many a cooler-than-thou music snob reaching for the volume knob. But truth is, Vanderslice cannot be faulted for over-dramatizing his material. With topics that include ground-level narratives from the War on Terror, the convoluted nightmare plot of Lynch’s Mulholland Drive and the singer’s own endless reserve of personal tragedies, it’s hard to sound low-key.

Cellar Door’s not-quite-emo won’t be a problem for everyone—Vanderslice is the kind of guy who makes every mopey English concentrator’s day by adapting Shelley for his lyrics, rediscovering British Romantics as proto-Obersts. But as perfectly-crafted as each individual song is, listening to the full album makes you want to remind Vanderslice not to forget to be cool, in that distant, disaffected sense of the word. Sometimes caring too much is a bad thing.

—Simon W. Vozick-Levinson

Juvenile

Juve the Great

(Cash Money/Universal)

When Juvenile departed Cash Money Records, the label he single-handedly brought to prominence, his career seemed all but over. While Cash Money artists like the Big Tymers and Boo & Gotti cranked out a series of hits, he was stuck promoting no-name rappers via his UTP Playas collective. But like the Prodigal Son of the New Orleans rap scene, Juvenile has returned to Cash Money—and Juve the Great just might be the record that saves his career.