“It’s better to make them wince than just have people snapping their fingers. The stuff we do is so pop and sing-alongy that we need the lyrics to sort of counter that.” That’s Juliana Hatfield, talking about some of the more blistering moments on the Blake Babies’ new album, the plangent Sunburn.
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The Blake Babies are a rock ‘n’ roll trio who, as Hatfield implies, create confectionary melodies, jangly songs, and roaring banks of choruses, then just as efficiently undermine them with some pretty painful analyses on the subject of interpersonal relations. “You were trying to cop a feeling while I was trying to get away,” sings Hatfield on Sunburn’s lead track; and just a few songs later she’s in even rougher territory: “You / You’re pitiful when you beg / You / You’re pitiful when your hand is on my leg.” But Hatfield isn’t shrill or cruel or polemical; she switches characters effortlessly, lacerates herself as well, and time and time again comes back to love: “Over at the hospital / They will dress my wounds / But they won’t really heal until”–and here her falsetto reaches till it breaks under the strain–“they’re touched by you.” She’s one of the more interesting new songwriters in rock right now.
The band, in rehearsals in Bloomington for their fall tour, worry that the new record isn’t tough enough. “Sometimes I think it’s too nice,” Hatfield says. This doesn’t seem to be a problem: for every lyrical gorgeosity–“In a Million Years” or “Out There”–there’s a darker, acidic set piece. Strohm’s first solo singing effort is “Girl in a Box” (Dando is the male voice on Earwig); the song was originally written as a joke, but its portrait of laconic cruelty has a disturbing edge. Another standout is Strohm’s “Train,” a methodical trashing of both “Mystery Train” and–get this–Modern English’s “I’ll Melt With You.” The Blake Babies set the mournful words of “Mystery Train” to yet another soaring, aching chorus and pull it off.
