DiFranco delivers an 'Educated' album

Ani DiFranco's newest release Educated Guess is amazing in the way a country church might be beautiful -- its austereness amplifies the beauty of the material. Simple, stripped-down and fresh, DiFranco's latest is a mature reflection on love and life's trials and tribulations.\nThe entire album was recorded on vintage reel-to-reel 8 track equipment in New Orleans and Buffalo, NY. DiFranco played all the instruments, recorded all the music and mixed the album. She went as far as to do the Sharpie and Wite-Out art in the liner notes -- is anyone surprised that it's really, really good? Always a Renaissance woman, DiFranco proves herself again.\nThe music is, in typical DiFranco fashion, smart, insightful and funky in its own way. Educated Guess could be a slightly older, slightly jaded sister to Revelling/Reckoning. DiFranco's unique voice, which she uses as an instrument in a way rarely seen on today's music scene, shines against the crisp simplicity of her instrumentation. As she moves a little closer to the mainstream, DiFranco hangs onto her roots and her refusal to be pinned to a genre. \nThe track "Bodily" is a stark post-break-up epic; lush in its instrumentation and poetic in its lyrics, "Bodily" is the album's standout song. It's angry, but a few years later and a few years smarter. The sitar-like guitar is perhaps the most melodic on the album. The title track is also beautiful, but in a much gentler way than "Bodily." "Swim," the second track on the album, is a funky, smart song about getting away from it all. It's also the song on the album on which the recording process is the most evident.\nDiFranco's signature spoken-word pieces aren't absent. In "Grand Canyon," Ani talks of the "coolest f-word ever" -- feminism. She also meditates on the nature of patriotism, and the necessity of appreciation for those who struggled to make our generation's lives what they are. It's not a political statement per se, it's a statement of one rooted in her country's history. "Grand Canyon" is also a beautiful example of what can happen when artists get outside of a sterile recording studio -- falling rain sets a gentle pattern for DiFranco's spoken-word pieces.\nAs an Ani album, it's shockingly short, running a grand total of 48 minutes. But it functions well as a whole, like a short story collection that comes together with a sigh at the end.