When it comes to experiencing Educated Guess, you're nearly just as well off lighting a candle and reading over the liner booklet. The strongest part of the album is its poetry. On some tracks, like "Platforms," "Akimbo," and especially "The True Story of What Was," Difranco speaks her lyrics, with little trace of her usual, trademark dissonant guitar strums. At times it seems that the guitar is only needed for Difranco to exercise some kind of personal catharsis, as her ferocious, minimally structured style can sometimes be a distraction to beautiful, thought-provoking words.
Then again, there are times when the music and the words do blend together well, particularly in the final track, "Bubble," with its heavy, industrial riff complimenting the most melodic song on the album.
Some may be attracted by the anti-establishment themes, others by the symbolically unstructured music; in either case, Educated Guess is an album with confident, self-aware depth, that, in the right hands, would not be inaccurately called evocative.
Rating: 3.7 stars
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