Mitchell,joni - Taming The Tiger Price: €9.99 Availability: Immediate Dispatch

Arguably Mitchell's best studio recording since MINGUS, TAMING THE TIGER picks up where TURBULENT INDIGO left off, but there's a notable progression, both musical and lyrical. The biggest reason may be Mitchell's grasping of the production reins. Gone are the slick excesses of bassist Larry Klein's production. TAMING THE TIGER achieves a unity of vision, a fact that also owes to the arrangements' focus on Mitchell's own guitar and synthesizer work. The recurrent sonic texture here is an almost Zawinul-esque tapestry of electronic sounds; silvery synth and guitar-synth form an attractive latticework over which Mitchell lays her jazzy, unpredictable vocal melodies.
Though she's grown a bit crankier as she's gotten older, when she lambasts contemporary pop culture (the title track) and attacks Victorian mores ("Face Lift") she doesn't come off as curmudgeonly as she did on the diatribes of her previous album. There's an airiness and joy to TAMING THE TIGER that had been missing in Mitchell's music for a long time. Even the most cerebral tunes have a winning lightness.