Prom

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On her second solo album, Amy Ray pulls no punches. As she sings in "Rural Faggot," "I know you want to know the truth, and I'm the dyke who will give it to you." It's an anthem worthy of Bruce Springsteen (one of the many here) within a song cycle that revisits high school rites of passage in the South while coming to terms with sexual confusion, desire, and identity. For all of Prom's ambitious thematic sweep, much of the material combines a punk-rock urgency with the melodic catchiness of new wave, with little of the folkie earnestness that flavors Ray's collaboration as half of the Indigo Girls. There's a musical progression over the course of 10 songs, with the opening "Put It Out for Good" and "Driver Education" seeming to channel the hard-riffing energy of Ray's high school days, as if the music were the soundtrack of her adolescence, while the reflective maturity of the acoustic "Rodeo" and the rousing affirmation of "Let It Ring" that close the album suggest her graduation into an Indigo Girl. --Don McLeese