Records: Ani DiFranco's Up Up Up Up Up Up

By Peter Smith

This is not your older sister's Ani DiFranco. It's been about a year since her last release, Little Plastic Castle, was touted as a horizon-broadening production for the self-proclaimed folk singer. Now Di-Franco has taken the idea of branching out musically to new heights. Unfortunately, Up Up Up Up Up Up crashes to the floor.

Best known for her politicized, in-your-face lyrics and powerful voice, DiFranco has produced an intriguing album even if you don't pay attention to the words. The individual tracks vary greatly in sound and bring flavors into folk music that you probably wouldn't expect. She adds a synthesizer, organ, accordion, banjo, space phone, and water cooler to her usual acoustic guitar and vocal cords. But this may be too much of a good thing--on 6Up, all the variety seems to trip over itself.

Some tracks on 6Up, including "Virtue" and "Jukebox," have a traditional Ani feel to them, with powerfully strummed acoustic guitar and wandering, wobbling vocals that can bench press 450 lbs. These tracks work in unexpected twists particularly well, with highly distorted electric guitar and background vocals that sound like they're coming through a low-quality telephone receiver.

The problem I have with 6Up is the inconsistency in the rest of the tracks. They run the gamut from "Everest," a '50s-style crooner tune, to "Angel Food," a sort of jazzy instrumental improv session gone mad, to "Know Now Then," which turns a funk beat into a video-game laser-gun style cross between Space Invaders and Superfly. Certainly some of them are gems. "Come Away From It" opens like a spiritual with DiFranco's vocals, organ, upright bass, and softly swishing drums, morphs into an R&B wail and fades out as a crisp, harmonic a cappella trio. The sparse, somber "Trickle Down" paints an exquisitely heartbreaking picture of recession-stricken middle America and small-town industrial life. But the album as a whole just doesn't hold together.

The only constant on 6Up--other than the clear fact that someone in some studio has been playing around with the special effects board--is the album's utter lack of consistency. Maybe that's some kind of meta-narrative that I'm just not getting, but it seems to me that DiFranco simply has far too many things to say. And while a couple of them
sound real good, the fact that they're all pointed in different directions keeps the album from going anywhere at all. (Righteous Babe)

--Meredith B. Gordon

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