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JONI MITCHELL
"Shine"
Hear Music - Three stars
Joni Mitchell is angry -- angry enough about a lot of things to storm back into the music business after she had walked away from it in 2002. Melancholy has been replaced with feistiness and combativeness. "Shine on the fishermen with nothing in their nets/ Shine on rising oceans and evaporating seas/ Shine on our Frankenstein technologies" and so on, she scolds on the title track. "Money makes the trees come down," she condemns in "This Place." Mitchell even does a bouncy, edgy reprise of her 1970 hit "Big Yellow Taxi" ("Don't it always seem to go that you don't know what you got 'til it's gone.") The songs on "Shine," for the most part, dwell in the spare, experimental jazz-inspired atmosphere of her later albums. None of the material on the album is among Mitchell's best. Some of the songs (almost rants) are overkill. The rhythmic "Hana," the lyrical "If" -- based on the Rudyard Kipling poem -- "Night of the Iguana" and "Bad Dreams" stand out, though. Still, in a world of money jingles and...