Too damned soon. Don’t know what else to think or say. I feel a little shattered.
by krisis
consume
Obviously i’m too busy or too apathetic or something, cause life is starting to get a little dull on this end. Life gets dull when i have no anchor and i just drift from hour to hour without any sense of where i’ve been or where i’m going. As distracting as it might be, having a crush or a demo or tour tickets to chase after gives me a sense of purpose, of forward motion. And right now i’m just sitting here eating lots of chocolate with zero motivation at all; i don’t want to be here but i don’t want to go home and i don’t want to be playing guitar and i don’t really want to go to my voice lesson because eating several pounds of chocolate in a 24 hours span does not tend to aid one in producing beautiful noise. Listless is the word. So, yeah, i’m just taking it one minute at a time as i crash down out of my sugar rush, hoping the clock will learn to tick a little faster at some point today (other than while i’m asleep).
Things with which you can stay awake at night: Atomica, from the crack addled brains that brought you Bejeweled and Alchemy or Sitcom Character or Dictator … the name pretty much says it all. I’m several repetitions into the Reckoning and Revelling and my teeth feel tired and typing is not quite so easy as it should be, so i’m contemplating sleep. But first i must rise above the ranking of 5000 in Atomica!
Randomly, let’s rank all of the songs on the Ani DiFranco album after three days of listening! “Heartbreak Even” is definitely the best song in the set, but “So What” and “Marrow” are vying for the next best slot. Funkalicious “Ain’t That The Way” and “o.k.” are quite good, but i think they’re slightly topped by the guitar-based “grey” and “Imagine That.” “Garden of Simple” and “Subdivision” occupy a more middling acoustic rank on the charts, though “Your Next Bold Move” is surprisingly great. “Reckoning” is slow and thoughtful but i don’t mind, because the album needed that exact emotion once and it fits perfectly. “Tamburitza Lingua,” “What How When Where (why who)” and “Fierce Flawless” are all songs that are good and bad at once, with parts i’m obsessed with and parts i find rather boring. Past that i could take or leave the rest of the album, instrumentals and all. Obviously i’m still only three-quarters of the way through appreciating Reckoning, but i honestly can tell you i’ll never truly love “School Night” or “Old Old Song” since they’ve got two bad verses for every good one, and “Rock Paper Scissors” and “Sick of Me” are both a little too off kilter to catch my attention. So, there’s some unwarranted opinion that’s bound to change sometime soon; “Heartbreak Even” cannot possibly stand up to another week of continuous repeat, can it?
Just when you think Ani DiFranco is just a folk-singer who knows how to funk things up, you listen to the first half of the first half of her new set of discs and are informed “No, really she’s a kung-fu fighter of sound, so you better watch your ass.” She’s so over the extraneous arrangements, cornball lyrics, inability to play a decent solo song in the middle of an album, and nonsense musical experiments. It’s as though Dilate was that violent hint of adolescence showing through the simplicity of youth, and Living In Clip was the treasured family photo album of all the framed little moments up until then, and the next three were all of those awkward teenaged years of trying to learn the way you want to live, with a misstep for every beautiful moment. But now she’s arrived at where she was headed all this time. Everything i’ve heard so far out of Reckoning fits exactly into her sonic puzzle, and while it isn’t what i initially bought into, it’s something i can’t help but like.