Music Spectrum

Do judge a CD by its cover. At least in these case.

Comparing the covers artwork of Ani Difranco’s these releases really reveals the difference. 2004’s Educated Guess features a torso picture of Difranco in a room with mic stands and cords in the background. The back cover shows her hands working the mixing board and track recorder. The front cover of 2005’s Knuckle Down shows Difranco caught in a beautiful, big laugh. Like a flipbook, open the jacket to see laugh change to a sideways glance, coy look.

Just as these two covers reveal different images of Difranco, so these two CDs catch Difranco in quite different moods and modes. Educated Guess was entirely performed, recorded, and mixed by Difranco herself. Hence, the mixing board and track recorder picture. Knuckle Down finds Difranco complemented by many musicians and was co-produced by Joe Henry, the first time Difranco has allowed someone to share production duties on her album.

Because Educated Guess explores the many facets of Difranco’s folk music, almost like a modern art project, incorporating a free jazz feel, there’s a more distant, removed sound to the album. Hence, the torso pictures; we see her hands working the music, sculpting and crafting. The songs are often drenched in some gorgeous acoustic guitar picking, but that comes in between sparse, empty room sounds. For instance, on “You Each Time,” the cascading guitar intro stop-motions into a bluesy, rap-sing hook: “There you were each day/Six feet/Twenty feet,” but then that spills out into a spaced out pool below the rapids. With Educated Guess also having some spoken word tracks and some tracks punctuated by Adrian Legg type guitar work, you’ve got an album to match the torso/recording machines cover art.

The gorgeous, laughing, spontaneous emotion of this year’s Knuckle Down jumps out on track 1, the title track, like a movie that begins, going from black-blank screen to a scene from within a speeding car down a sun-drenched road. Difranco’s Peter Mayer/Peter Mulvey guitar picking finds Knuckle Down in a groove, funk, acoustic drive. “Modulation” sneaks up on that groove, crashing out as the storyteller crafts her scene, but the chorus clicks back into something that runs towards a full-on roots rock chorus. Laid-back bluesy flow on “Lag Time” is nicely layered guitars, strings, percussion, and keys (the liner notes don’t give instrumentation credits), which busts out like a jamband and has two Keller Willaims-styled guitar breaks.

Even on the tracks that stretch it out more like Educated Guess, where I can hear that guitar sound like Adrian Legg all over the place, even then, there’s more of a spontaneous kick to Knuckle Down.

There’s a Taj Mahal world folk thing going on with “Manhole,” a song which has this low-fi indie sound, some creepy whistling and strings, but the defiant chorus shouts down that empty night street. Like so many of Difranco’s song, these varied sounds are coupled with stories of love and derision, strength and defeat, streetlights shining among the drizzle-soaked, gasoline-spotted alley. Sure, the stories start with some brokedown sad-eyed stare, but then comes Difranco with a melody like a beautiful, big laugh. She grooves up the story, but still that story remains dark around the edges. You catch the funk, but like a flipbook, that funk opens to change the laugh to a sideways glance, coy look. She caught you in a dark tale, but she’s also telling you that you’ve learned something, didn’t ya?

Thanks to Righteous Babe Records for the review copies.

Also, thanks to Anna at Righteous Babe for the “Baby Creeper” onesie for my son, Samuel. He wore it when we went to Louisville, Kentucky’s Ear X-tacy Records to make sure they were well-stocked with Ani’s CDs. (They were. Go to earxtacy.com) The Righteous Baby shirt is Samuel’s first rock music shirt, and probably will be the one of the cleverest he’ll ever have. Get the baby in your life one!