Ani DiFranco-To The Teeth

On To The Teeth, her third album of 1999 along with Fellow Workers and Up Up Up Up Up Up, Ani DiFranco offers up 13 songs whose lyrics are as poetic an' political an' personal as ever, in musical arrangements guaranteed to stop you in your tracks and shake you from your ears to your toes. (Note the restraint we've shown in not including the phrase "to the teeth" in that last bit of hyperbole.) The vocal fireworks, high-velocity fingerwork, and funkalicious grooves listeners already know and love are all here, but so are some twists and turns that underscore Ani's varied musical sense. Ani herself agreed back in 1999 that this one was different from any of her earlier albums: "There's so many crazy things on this record! It spans a year of various recording situations; it brings together a bunch of different studio settings for me." If you're the sort who pays attention to such things, you already know Ani's fondness for such intimate environments as The Congress House in Aust