There are a great many reasons to admire Ani DiFranco. She has a strong voice and a great sense of humor. She has done more than any other woman today to revise the folk tradition, bringing in a punk aesthetic and an alterna-chick confessional style (she can sling a fuck better than the best of them), as well as dashes of hip-hop and electric funk. She knows how to put together a bitchin' ensemble (and I don't just mean band). And hasn't every hipster heard by now that DiFranco founded her own label at nineteen and has since released ten records on it? This DIY daughter is nobody's little girl.

As demonstrated by last year's live recording Living in Clip, DiFranco is a force of nature onstage. The challenge for her has been to translate that intense experience onto a studio album. Would that Little Plastic Castle qualified as her breakthrough on that score. It's a clever, thoughtful, relatively quiet record that gets better with every spin. But while DiFranco's songwriting grows evermore complex, the new record lacks by half the ferocity of her last studio recording, 1996's scathing Dilate.

Much of Little Plastic Castle attempts to reckon with the swell of attention that DiFranco has received after releasing Dilate – and that's where many of the new album's disappointments lie. Typical of performers who grow up in public, DiFranco defensively struggles to play with her image and also maintain her black-sheep status in the corporate world. It can get a little tiresome. "People talk about my image/Like I come in two dimensions/Like lipstick is a sign of my declining mind," she sings on the title track. In another world-weary lament, "Fuel," she complains, "Maybe I should put a bucket over my head and a marshmallow in each ear/And stumble around for another dumb, numb week/For another humdrum hit song to appear."

In an effort to escape the humdrum, perhaps, DiFranco has indulged some creative quirks, providing flourishes and fanfare here and there. A bright brass section adds mariachi flavor to the title track and moody punctuation to "Deep Dish"; Morse code sounds flash through "Swan Dive." Unfortunately, most of the frills are distracting.

Fine musicianship does emanate from her tight crew (Andy Stochansky on drums and Jason Mercer on bass, with the inimitable Sara Lee filling in on bass for three tracks) as well as from DiFranco herself, who picks and speedstrums a smart guitar and plays concertina and Vox organ. As usual, her versatile vocal tool is used to great effect, and her grand metaphor-making is in full force.

DiFranco's singing on "Glass House" – which also probes her ambivalence about being an artist with growing influence – is beautifully haunted. "Swan Dive" is a powerful meditation on the meaning of success in relation to tender love. It is on these tracks that DiFranco more successfully melds the political with the personal.

Oddly for a bona fide protest singer, her songs really take off when they embrace ambiguity rather than moral absolutes. The real energy flares on "Gravel," the rapid-fire strumming and bitten-off lyrics of which make her angry, forlorn case: "You were never a good lay/And you were never a good friend/Oh, what can I say/I adore you." The gentle "As Is" ruefully reconciles with a less-than-ideal lover.

But the show stopper is the fourteen-minute lamentation that ends the record. "Pulse" melds Patti Smith spoken-word storytelling with a Barry White-like groove that is both heartbreakingly sexy and sad. As the musicians lock into a supple rhythmic trance and DiFranco whispers over and over, "I would offer you my pulse/Give you my breath," guest trumpeter Jon Hassell hits wry and musing notes of resignation.

This track is one of several that showcase new directions for DiFranco on Little Plastic Castle – and they're worth every false step. Castle isn't the album that will get her name on the rock-star map of great records. But DiFranco may not care; she has, after all, already changed the decade's musical landscape. (RS 781)

BARBARA O'DAIR