Ani DiFranco's latest album, Knuckle Down , is decent, but it has issues with momentum. About half of its 12 songs build to the best tracks on the disc, then everything slows down and it meanders its way to the end. This is not to say that DiFranco's most recent issue is bad; it merely begins to stumble toward its conclusion.
For the Ani unaware, she's something of an urban folk musician, emphasizing her songs' lyrics and laying them on a bed of percussion-like guitar. DiFranco—who contributes her trademark guitar and vocals to the CD—is working for the first time with a co-producer, Joe Henry.
Thankfully, DiFranco still has some of the energy she demonstrated in the mid nineties, specifically songs like “Superhero” off 1996's Dilate and “The Million You Never Made” from 1995's Not a Pretty Girl . Some of the same sentiments from “Million” are expressed in Knuckle 's third song, “Manhole,” but the fervor of the former has dissipated, to say the least.
The album's first song shows what happens when a musician does something unique and idiosyncratic, but becomes aware of it and then does it purposefully and far too frequently (The “Steven Tyler Syndrome”). Like the Aerosmith front man's cracking voice, DiFranco has a tendency to throw her voice very high. When done occasionally it can have a nice highlighting effect for DiFranco's lyrics. When it's overused it just sounds warbly.
Highlights of the album include “Seeing Eye Dog,” a stark bluesy song featuring some very adept accompaniment by Todd Sickafoose on the string base. The song is also a bit of DiFranco's trademark songwriting; her cynical sarcasm seeps in phrases like “I love the way your stories seem to fall from you lips / with just enough slobber so it sparkles and drips.” This is also one of the first tracks where the lyrical and musical quality of the songs match each other—earlier in the recording, the better-worded songs are set to less impressive music, and vice versa.
Halfway through the CD, it gets very good. The aforementioned “Dog” ushers in a run of about four songs that show the height of DiFranco's work on this disc. Her best songs touch on the loss of youthful naïveté and the soul-stealing nature of the workforce machine. The eighth track, “Parameters,” is a nice spoken word piece told to a 33 year old woman who, “…having cautiously turned down the flame / under your eyes” finds her vision “a dim flashlight / that you have to shake all the way to the outhouse,” and is followed by “Callous,” a song about the frustrations of a bad relationship. These lyrics represent the sentiments of the album's better songs and DiFranco's better work in general. As long as she's wallowing in her ennui, the listener is reveling in some good music.
The tenth track, “Paradigm,” is the last of the best; it's a song about the gray areas between flag-waving, tax paying patriots (DiFranco's parents) and the growing cynicism encroaching on such Norman Rockwell fantasies. DiFranco really chooses neither side in this song and instead presents a song about the complexity of the space between the two worlds.
The rest of the CD fizzles out, returning to the overall quality of the first five songs. Again, it's not bad, but the contrast between the better songs and the rest gives a feeling that the album is building to something never really accomplished. Knuckle Down is overall an above average, if lethargic, album.