Alice DiMicele
Album: Swim
Label: Alice Otter Music
Tracks: 10
Website: http://www.alicedimicele.com

Alice has shared her trademark "acoustic soul" with sympathetic audiences for close on three decades now, and this latest album can be seen as a kind of consolidation of her style, including as it does a reworking of a track from her 1994 album Naked (If I Could Move The World) along the way. Once established, her special brand of self-styled "groove folk" is easy to fall into, and Swim's stall-setting opening track Soul Fly Free does the job nicely. So in fact do all ten numbers here - in fact, on occasion it's almost too easy and comfortable and tasteful.

The basic musical signature sound is built around Alice's percussive acoustic guitar, while there's plenty of great instrumental support from the likes of Bill Payne of Little Feat, Darol Anger, Skip Edwards, Vince Herman, Andy Thorn and Jeff Pevar (to name but a few of the participants), and a reliable rhythm section taken from Gino Vannelli's band. The difficulty for me is that the playing's usually so darned good that Alice's songs don't always get to score high on memorability, although when the songs are taken on board individually there's a persuasive stylishness at work at every turn in the road. The most interesting tracks tend to be those with the rootsiest content - Schoolhouse, a kind of love song to a wave on the Klamath river (which almost sounds like an outtake from Dylan's Desire period); the western-and-Americana-tinged Open Road; and the beautifully mellow, wistful This Love. And there's a relaxed, gently pebble-tossed cover of the Dead's timeless classic Ripple (from American Beauty) amicably appended to the self-penned songs preceding it. But when embroiled in the funkier climes of the title track and Inside, I find my attention wandering all too easily.

Summing up: there's no doubting that Alice knows what she's about; she writes and performs with complete confidence and with the full support of her collaborators, but for probably half of the span of this album I find it less rewarding and less able to connect fully, even when concentrating on her lyrics. I do however have a sneaking impression that subsequent playthroughs of the disc just might improve matters somewhat.

David Kidman