The Bottom Line: At times of great emotional upheaval, sometimes the best thing to do is to reach for songs and artists from a happier time in your life.
c-option's Full Review: God Bless the Blake Babies * by Blake Babies
At times of great emotional upheaval, sometimes the best thing to do is to be reactionary about music, to reach for songs and artists from a happier time in your life. To pretend you’re back in those happier days, to wipe out all the knowledge and experience you’ve gained, and simultaneously wipe out all the heart-crushing things that have happened since then. For me, this means going back pretty far, to seven years ago when I was just discovering alterna-pop, thought anything with poor singing or waves of distortion for the sake of distortion was weird, didn’t know the difference between an indie label and a major, and the Blake Babies ruled my pop universe (if I wanted to be strictly technical about this, I’d have to go back almost ten years, to before I met him, when Don Henley and Sting were my gods. But despite tearing up during Henley’s performance of “The Heart of the Matter” on SNL last night, I don’t think I’m ready for such a drastic step). Lucky for me and my war-torn psyche, the Blake Babies are perhaps also experiencing a need for psychic renewal, and have reunited for a new album, appropriately titled God Bless the Blake Babies.
The Blake Babies were one of those made-to-be a cult college rock bands, the ones that every halfway cool rock kid would speak knowingly about, but about which the kids hooked on Janet Jackson or Tom Petty or Sheriff would have not a clue (modern fame-level equivalent: The Promise Ring, maybe, who are popular enough to draw scads of youngsters at smaller venues but about which the TRL-obsessed know nothing). Comprised of John Strohm (guitar), Freda Boner (drums – see, cool, chick drummer), and Juliana Hatfield (bass), the Blake Babies made bright guitar music, sharpened with woebegone lyrics mainly of heartbreak and self-loathing, nearly all sung by Hatfield in that breathy little girl lost voice of hers. As is my wont, I actually got into them a year or two after they had already broken up, finding them via my Juliana Hatfield/Evan Dando obsession of the early 90s. But once I discovered them, for awhile there their second and third albums Earwig and Sunburn became the soundtrack to my life, the things I listened to countless times everyday and rewound to my favorite songs so many times that the tapes (yes, it was tapes for me then, kids) wore thin in spots.
And now they’re back, and virtually nothing has changed in their sound. The guitars are still bright, the harmonies still smooth, the lyrics still collegially (but touchingly) self-obsessed, the hooks still unbelievably catchy. Lemonhead boy Evan Dando even makes a slew of cameo appearances. The only things that set God Bless the Blake Babies apart from the albums the band was making twelve years ago are the overall contentment expressed in many of the songs on the album and (perhaps related) that everyone gets to write and sing this time, not just Juliana, not just John, but Freda, wonderful Freda, too. Oh, and the drug theme of nearly all of Juliana’s songs.
Freda, the force behind the reunion and the one who drums with a Mona Lisa smile on her face, has the sunniest songs on the album. The modern girl group perfection of “Nothing Ever Happens” (which Freda wrote but Juliana sings) is the perfect salve for someone for whom too much has happened of late. And “When I See His Face” (co-written with her husband) is one of those blissfully romantic songs not usually in the Blake Babies repertoire, what with Juliana’s tales of men who done her wrong and John’s sardonic views on the subject. But wait, John’s got a blissfully romantic number here too, the swirling guitar-driven “Picture Perfect,” with the line I love most on the whole album, She’s the moment in the song that shivers down my spine. From someone whose most notable non-co-written credit is the hilarious but somewhat disturbing “Girl in a Box,” John’s rebirth as a romantic is a little surprising but welcome all the same.
And then there are Juliana’s songs, some co-written with John, some written alone, some written by non-Babies but sung by her. To her usual theme of “men suck, love sucks” (a theme I can get behind these days), she has now added a drug obsession, striking out from her usual codependency to discuss drug use in the first-person. From “Baby Gets High” to “Waiting for Heaven” to “Until I Almost Died,” Juliana seems to have spent a lot of time thinking about getting the monkey off her back or someone else’s. That someone else may be good ol’ Evan Dando, whose contribution “Brain Damage” has him boasting that he’s “done all the drugs that [he] could find.” Supposedly the album was originally going to be called High as a Kite and marketed as a drug-themed concept album, but even though the drug songs work well, happily it wasn’t. Which means that an old-school Juliana weeper like “What Did I Do” (What did I do to make you be so cruel to me, what did I do to make you want to leave me lonely?) is not out of place and can be programmed on endless repeat for maximum wallowing.
While the new Blake Babies probably aren’t going to win many converts in this age when pop music has become synonymous with preprogrammed backing tracks and gyrating around in as little clothing as possible (man, I sound old), this new album is a shining example of why the alterna-pop music of my youth should be poised for a comeback. Of course, if you liked the Blake Babies before, God Bless the Blake Babies is more than worthy of a place in your CD collection. And if you’re in need of a potion to help you pretend that the mid to late 90s and early 00s never happened, it’s damn near essential.
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