Ani DiFranco’s latest release and eighteenth album, So Much Shouting, So Much Laughter, is a two-disk set of live performances, her first since 1997’s vLiving in Clip. The twenty-four tracks are a distressing example of what can only be described as sonic mongrelism.

DiFranco, a “Jazz-rock-folk-entertainer-poet” from Buffalo, New York, has been one of the most successful independent recording artists to date. She founded her own record company, righteous babe records, and has found her own little niche in a world dominated by corporate music and musicians.

Politics, sadly enough, plays too large a role in the presentation of this album, which comes with so much political baggage that it makes critiquing the music seems like an offense to every social cause.

Throughout the album it seems that message is attempting to subsume music but fails miserably. Socially conscious music is dead precisely because musicians like DiFranco think that “metaphor” backed with bastardized music makes the singing of bad poetry good. “Conscious” music is possible–think Curtis Mayfield’s Superfly–but it demands conciseness of both message and form. So Much Shouting, So Much Laughter lacks both.

DiFranco does not sing (or preach) as much as she caterwauls, for only caterwauling could accompany such a poorly tuned guitar. If the listener can manage to penetrate the uncontrollably shifting pitch and the breathy pretentiousness of the vocals, they will be assaulted with an endless stream of political and personal consciousness that neither enlightens nor informs.

DiFranco used to be a one-woman act. She gradually added musicians, and now travels with a six-piece band. It is disingenuous to try to qualify the sound with a synthesis of terms – what is folk-pop-punk-rap-jazz-indie-rock-poetry, anyway? (An argument could be made that the synthesis of terms denotes a complexity that exceeds the terms themselves, but this is just what Curly called “the double-talk.”)

There are horns (one saxophone player admirably fakes Stan Getz), winds, and a droning organ with a mid-western sound. But overall, the sound is not an amalgamation of the best of Bossa Nova, Jazz, folk-rock, or anything else, but rather a bouillabaisse comprised of the skins left rotting on the metaphorical musical wharf.

So Much Shouting, So Much Laughter is more than two hours of tiresome and grating music.

So Much Shouting, So Much Laughter is available on righteous babe music. Visit their website at www.righteousbabe.com