Reaching another peak in her 18 studio album career, Ani DiFranco builds on everything she’s learned, from the raw strings of her brittle guitar to the haunting melodies of her spoken word tracks, and blends it all into her best work of art yet.
Knuckle Down has twelve tracks that can each standalone and carry the weight, but interwoven into the disc seamlessly create an epic sound unlike any of DiFranco’s past musical tones. In this story she’s created we find the raw edge of her experimental studio disc “Educated Guess” transformed into something else entirely. While maintaining the raw, gritty nature with some of the sounds in the angrier “Manhole” or the sexier “Seeing Eye Dog,” the sound has been fine tuned with the help of back up vocals, strings, and bass that work in complete harmony for a sound that can be yelled to, danced to, grooved to, chilled to, or just had.
Lyrically, in complete conjunction with the musical tone, the disc moves into a new place where the short stories tell a new story about Ani DiFranco. While the anger is still there, there is a new sense of empowerment through peace with yourself as opposed to the expression of that anger. We feel the growth of character in “Knuckle Down” and “Lag Time” while grappling with personal history in “Paradigm” in a way DiFranco hasn’t shown us before.
The disc contains the single spoken word track “Parameters” which extends beyond the slam poetry sound of previous diatribes and creates a haunting track of strings and whispered voices that result in a new product entirely. After stripping her music bare, this disc picks up the pieces and puts them together in an extraordinary blend of rhythms and context. After three hours of listening to the intricate fabric of her music you suddenly only just realize that you’ve heard it a few times through – and get carried away for another three hours. |