Album: Ani DiFranco, "Which Side Are You On?" (Righteous Babe)

An Ani DiFranco album used to be an "event" only in the sense that certain things were regulated in the universe that contained her, such as the perpetual recurrence of the month of February, and swimming pools that are full come summertime.

But "Which Side Are You On?" is her first effort in four years, and it's been a long four years; long for DiFranco, long for everyone. "Red Letter Year," her last one, followed childbirth and marriage and pushed her in a new direction: simultaneously lushly layered and laid-back, it felt like a conscious pushing away of an overtly combative, stripped-down past. Longtime fans mostly hung in there, but a few had to wonder what the future would bring and if their firebrand Ani would return at any point in the near future.

Well, she gave them an entire presidential election cycle, and returns with fists clenched and armed with the sort of politically charged firepower that has been her signature songwriting gesture for much of her career. By turns self-deprecating ("I got red, scabby hands and purple scabby feet and you can smell me coming from halfway down the street") and alarmed ("And I gotta say I'm amazed and not in a good way how much I don't remember"), DiFranco trips a silent alarm of underlying nervous tension that belies the good-timey spirit of the album's first few songs.

Until a cover of the protest standard "Which Side Are You On?," of course, with an appearance on banjo from Pete Seeger himself, and then you realize: this is an Occupy album. "They stole a few elections," she snarls over stabbing electric fretwork. "Come on all good workers, this year is our time." The words are old, but feel fresh and incisive under DiFranco's laser-beam glare.

"Who put the poison in the atmosphere?" she asks over the gently beatnik exotica of "Splinter," explicitly and repeatedly bringing her personal back to the political, or possibly the other way around; "Who put the poison in me?" On tracks like "Promiscuity" she riffs on a sex-positive worldview while acoustically riding the jangle-jangle rails of some imaginary fruit juice commercial. "Promiscuity is nothing more than traveling," she boasts. "There's more than one way to see the world." It's like a gender-flipped Jack Johnson song with an actual thought process: "Nature always gets its way."

DiFranco will not be everyone's cup of tea, and she seems to understand and accept that the audience she has gathered before her is the one who will still be there for the end of the show. "Amendment" is an angry, righteous sputter. "Wouldn't it be nice if we had an amendment to give civil rights to women?" she asks, then answers herself sardonically: "that's just redundant. Chicks got it good now; they can almost be President." On the brooding, Nick Drake-like "Zoo," which closes out the set, DiFranco seems to startle herself with new insights. "I think I'm what they call sensitive and easily thrown off my game," she acknowledges, almost apologetically explaining that she can't keep up with television because "all that shit and pettiness just makes me feel drained," finally adding that she walks "past all my old self-loathing like I walk past animals in the zoo, trying not to really see them in a prison they didn't choose." There's a weariness at work, but also a determined spirit expressing her will to go on despite odds that maybe feel a bit hopeless. "Pour your love into your children until there's nothing left to say," she concludes, and you suspect that she's talking about her songs here as much as her own offspring.

Aside from the reinvigorated feminist-ing and the timely socio-economic rally cries, "Which Side" mainly serves as a refinement of her previous high-water marks and an assurance that her bark is still equally matched by her bite: "If you're not getting happier as you get older," she scolds, "then you're fucking up."