If you can hand anything to Ani DiFranco’s new CD “Evolve;” it has class.

The CD has a stylish cover and a discreet stab on the back at the music industry – “Unauthorized duplication, while sometimes necessary, is never as good as the real thing.” Too true, at least for this CD.

Ani DiFranco’s music, while making good use of guitar, but also making use of a whole mix of other instruments by her talented bandmates, seems to take a backseat to DiFranco’s unique lyrics.

-“What is a camera but a box of light?/ What is a guitar but a box of sound?/ You think I don’t understand/ But I think I might,” DiFranco sings in her song “Promised Land.”

DiFranco has released albums for 13 years, and she has tried a lot of new stuff for “Evolve.” Some of it works, but frankly, the CD, when you boil it right down, is poetry with songs added on.

“Serpentine” is a 10-minute, 26-second monster of a poem in which DiFranco gives her opinions on everything from problems with the school system to greed in society.

“Big government should not stand between a man and his money/ What’s good for business is good for the country/ Our children still take that lie like communion/ The same old line the Confederacy used on the Union,” Difranco sings in “Serpentine,” making clever use of tone, elongation and speed to give full effect to her emotional work.

However, while Ani DiFranco is masterful with her words, she didn’t grasp the idea of making a unique CD. A listener easily could get through the album without noticing any change in the tracks. This can be argued as a good or a bad thing, but I found the idea of an album that keeps a monotonous tone with very little alteration in her use of instruments or voice throughout as a bit of a rip-off.

If you’re looking for a good CD to listen to while studying, or have a thing for laid-back poetry, this just might be your album. But for everything new DiFranco claims to have done, it ends up being the same old, same old.