Ani DiFranco
  Knuckle Down (Righteous Babe)
by Marc Hirsh

originally published in Amplifier, March-April 2005

It is inconceivable that Ani DiFranco is unaware of the political and cultural environment that currently exists in the United States. She has never shied away from making her voice heard and putting her activism where her mouth is. If her Vote Dammit! tour this past fall was eclipsed by MoveOn.org’s Vote For Change lineup, that may have been because the novelty of watching Bruce Springsteen, Dave Matthews, John Mellencamp and Bonnie Raitt making explicit political appeals was news. For DiFranco, on the other hand, it’s simply understood that that’s what she does.

Which makes Knuckle Down all the more perplexing. There are a few feints in the direction of political content, but it’s all shadow-play and wishful thinking. “Minerva” builds its refrain around a borrowing from “The Star-Spangled Banner,” and it’s easy enough to read DiFranco’s lyrics as metaphor for the political climate – the intruder in her bedroom in “Parameters,” for instance, and declarations like “I’m going outside to watch the house burn down/Across the street” – but that has more to do with the listener’s agenda than anything DiFranco’s doing. Even the rebel imagery of “Seeing Eye Dog” is used merely to describe the effects of love. The one song that seemingly acknowledges the elephant in the room is “Paradigm,” about the birth of her activism, but it’s about the past, not the present or the future. There’s nothing anywhere to suggest that DiFranco intends her lyrics to mean anything other than what they mean.

All of these complaints are horribly unfair, of course, since they dismiss Knuckle Down for failing to live up to standards that its creator never claimed for it. Taken on its own merits, it’s simply a good, if flawed, DiFranco album, with slightly claustrophobic production (by DiFranco and Joe Henry) that serves songs like the kick-snap “Modulation” and the gorgeous “Studying Stones” well by hemming in her vocals so tightly that she has nowhere to go but forward. There’s a sense of structural collapse on a number of tracks, as if the music was getting away from the singer; the title track pares itself down until it practically resets itself after the chorus, while “Manhole,” “Seeing Eye Dog” and “Lag Time” have moments when the guitars wander off the map before turning themselves around to get back into the song.

Throughout Knuckle Down, DiFranco’s voice is, as always, her strongest asset, full of power, subtlety and confidence. Her control remains impressive, as does her willingness to relinquish it when it suits the material; two of the most thrilling moments on the album, during “Manhole” and “Lag Time,” come when her voice gives way in an abandonment of technique in favor of unfettered expression. “Parameters,” meanwhile, is a pure spoken-word piece that is reliant entirely on her delivery as a seven-note guitar figure repeats ad infinitum.

Somewhere around its midpoint, though, Knuckle Down hits a patch of lugubriousness from which it never quite recovers, which is deadly for a performer whose unbridled energy is one of her defining characteristics. With the last half of the album primarily given over to songs that sound like rougher outtakes from Whiskey Tango Ghosts, the closing “Recoil” comes as a relief, if only because Ani-on-autopilot is almost like a breath of fresh air by then. Uneven as it is, Knuckle Down moves DiFranco one step closer to confirming her status as her generation’s Joni Mitchell, with her restless musical curiosity, her dexterous, jazz-infused voice and her complete willingness to bare her soul, both obliquely and candidly, in her songs. But DiFranco’s politics have always been deeply engrained in those soul-baring lyrics, and for whatever reason, at this particular moment in history, when the issues close to her heart are on the line, she has released an album that makes it look like she’s napping on the job.

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