posted 02-17-2002 01:17 AM               

It’s unlikely that the non-fan will be turned on to Suzanne Vega by her latest effort, Songs in Red and Gray, if he hasn’t found anything he likes in her prior material. The album, while pleasing enough to the ear, is little different from other Vega albums like 99.9º F and Nine Objects of Desire.

The album also lacks the standout elements of Nine Objects (“Caramel,” the album’s third track, was appropriated for the soundtrack of The Truth About Cats & Dogs and was probably the only thing about the movie that made any sense) and Vega’s 1987 sophomore release, Solitude Standing, which brought such classics as “Luka,” “Tom’s Diner” and the titular single. By contrast, Songs does little to advance Vega’s storytelling and artistic styles, or even itself.

Rather than being a musical journey with a clear path, Songs seems rather to amble along without much of a purpose. Indeed, the disc’s cover art features Vega walking along a country path in autumn; the music on this album seems as pointlessly peripatetic as a Sunday stroll through a state park. There are few lilts in the album’s melancholy, and those that do exist – “Widow’s Walk” and “Last Year’s Troubles” come to mind – feature lyrics just as maudlin as the rest of the offering.

There is, however, a method to Vega’s madness. The album documents her reactions to her recent divorce from producer Mitchell Froom, and the breakup of her family unit as a whole (Vega has a daughter). In “(I’ll Never Be) Your Maggie May,” admits her complicity in the breakup, singing “I’ll love you first and let you go/ Because it must be so/ And you’ll forgive or you will not.”

But the sessile emotionality of Songs is evident toward the end of the disc, in “Machine Ballerina,” when Vega asks, “Am I an afternoon’s pastime?/ A thing on a string/ to be thrown and retrieved.” Honestly: We’ve heard it before, from others more verbally evocative. And if this is as far as you’ve gotten by the end of the album . . . well, we’ll hope your daughter turns out all right.