Album Review: Ani DiFranco, Unprecedented Sh!t

What do you do when you’ve been resolutely ploughing your own musical furrow since the age of 19, when you have 22 albums already under your belt and you want to keep things fresh? For her 23rd album, feminist icon and DIY legend Ani DiFranco enlisted the services of BJ Burton, the producer and engineer who worked with Low on their later albums and helped Justin Vernon to reinvent the Bon Iver sound on 22, A Million.

Burton’s touch is all over tracks like ‘Spinning Room’ and ‘Virus’, creating unusual electro-inspired backdrops over which DiFranco croons, the latter veering weirdly from catchy calypso to electro-cacophony for the chorus. Burton’s ability to transform multiple noises into a coherent whole is evident on ‘You Forgot To Speak’, all multi-tracked vocals and effects, while the weird, spacy rhythm of ‘The Thing At Hand’ has a distinctly jazzy feel.

The pizzicato cacophony of the title-track sees distorted scratchy FX forming an almost hip-hop backbeat, over which Ani sets out her manifesto, and worries about what’s coming down the tracks in her home country of America.

The acoustic ‘More Or Less Free’, the twang of ‘Boots Of A Soldier’ and the brilliant, Nashville-heavy ‘New Bible’ are more conventional, but the latter proves that DiFranco still knows her way around a killer couplet: “Dunno which of my habits will be my demise / But there’s more ways every day to betray what is wise”.

Still kicking against the pricks.

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