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The Blake Babies: God Bless the Blake Babies
BY LESLIE KUO
In 1986, somewhere in Boston, three teenagers formed a band called the Blake Babies. Juliana Hatfield was still learning the bass and Freda Love had just started drumming. But upon teaming up with guitarist John Strohm, they started playing quirky pop tunes. Critics dug it. People liked it. And life was good.
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They kept it up for the next five years, until their 1990 album, Sunburn, after which they went their "separate" ways. Over the course of the next decade, they occasionally met in bands like the Lemonheads and Antenna and released solo work.
Now, in 2001, the band is back with God Bless The Blake Babies, 12 new songs for the indie-rock crowd, a few of whom fondly remember the group, and a great number of whom recognize Hatfield's voice from solo singles like "Spin the Bottle." Still going for that early '90s rock-pop sound, Hatfield, Love, and Strohm are trying to do two things at once: recreate the music of the Blake Babies as it was, but also make songs fresh enough to make us perk up our ears 10 years on.
The Blake Babies do a good job of recapturing their original sound. It's a clear and ear-pleasing form of guitar pop, with lyrics that tend toward the pretty. Hatfield's voice, 10 years not withstanding, still has that girlish tone as she sings lines like "I never did you wrong/but it makes a better song." The hard part for the group appears to have been shaping these elements into songs of a consistent quality. There are a couple of mid-tempo tracks that bring nothing to the album and serve only to bog it down.
However, the better tracks shine subtly, either with witty premises or just some great lines. They voice the perfect complaint about suburban boredom in "Nothing Ever Happens," a rockin' song to play out your window in your excruciatingly dull town. Hatfield swigs poison so she'll get to heaven faster in "Waiting For Heaven." This is followed appropriately by "Until I Almost Died," which makes a pop-cliché joke when the string section starts up during the line "keep the violins away." And the stripped-down goodness of "When I See His Face," which starts with only a guitar, vocals, and barely moving maracas but crescendoes to an all-out rocker, proves that the Blake Babies can still make basic pop rock sound interesting and exciting. Songs of innocence and songs of experience, indeed. (Rounder)
All materials © 2001 The Yale Herald, Inc., and its staff.
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