Ani Difranco .:. Reprieve

Reprieve is the latest entry in Ani Difranco's astonishing catalogue of music. It sounds more like a diary than an album, and it's no surprise. In addition to touring nonstop with a crew of musicians as diverse as former members of James Brown's and the Indigo Girls' bands, she manages to record an album every eleven months or so, chronicling everything from her disgust with the current political regime to her shaky relationship to those friendships that seem to never stop going.

Reprieve is a mix of both. It takes the slow, meandering tone of her recent albums, which works well with Difranco's emotional songs, which are always stabbingly effective ("I was homesick and I was high/surrounded by a language/in which I could only say hello"). But that same approach falters when she applies it to politics, and we're left with almost laughably random lyrics like "Ramadan orange alert/everybody put on your gas mask." Not that I disagree with her politics, but it's a point that's already been made better and conglomerations of catch-phrases like "trickle down Israel, patriarchies realign" are something that no one understands and no one wants to hear. Still, it's worth listening and using the "skip" button for the good songs, which are plenty.

Regina Spektor .:. Far

Regina Spektor's third proper album is like that cynical older cousin who you love to sit next to at family functions. Totally funny, mostly good-natured, and both angry and delicious -- angrilicious? -- like the kind of person who says all the things you want to say but don't.

And -- uh -- says them all in cute, random metaphors and rhyming couplets and sweet, sweet melodies.

After the meandering intro of "The Calculation" -- a good, mid-tempo, semi-funked-out song about relationships, technology, and emotional indifference -- we get a virtual onslaught of Regina with the instant hookiness, smileyness, and spine-tingling anticipation of the piano chords that lead into "Eet."

The song might be named for its homonym, or it might be the way Spektor writes down her own whimsical non-word singing on paper. Then, when the drums come in -- "You spend half of your life/trying to fall behind/using your headphones to drown out your mind" -- the song becomes simultaneously triumphant and snarky. And it's especially victorious when you consider it's a song about hipster kids who are so preoccupied with looking cool that they forget how to dance. (That's what I think it's about, anyway.) Really, it's a self-defeating argument -- by the time you're done analyzing, you're hopping up and down in your desk chair, anyway.

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Regina Spektor .:. Begin to Hope

Regina Spektor comes from the New York City anti—folk scene, that curious bisection of painfully earnest singer-song writing and hipster cool. After an unexpected tidal wave of popularity with her eponymous debut album, this -— her major label debut -— is a weird and kind of cool ground between the ethereal weirdness of Kate Bush and the put you to sleep laziness of, I don’t know, Paula Cole? The opening track (and first single), “Fidelity,” is a soft, dreamy orchestral sample that’s trip-hop and electronica-ish and catchy as hell.

There’s a definite line that Spektor could step over and cross into boring-girl soft-rock territory, but, for the most part, she manages to sidestep it. After all, she puts lines like “I went to a protest/just to rub against strangers” together with “Summer in the city means/cleavage cleavage cleavage,” and starts singing in French and then falls into Russian. She’s tricky and playful and, as an indie-folk secret, Regina Spektor totally held it together without being trite. Will the big time kill her? So far, it hasn’t—and here’s hoping it won’t.