Consumer Guide Album

Blake Babies: Innocence and Experience [Mammoth, 1993]
Who would have figured that the quintessential indie babe would make something of one of those preband-, demo-, live-, and 45-strewn overview comps where other slackers hide their dirty laundry? She's actually impressive covering, duh, a Neil Young song--and, oh wow, a GrassRoots trifle that hit before she was out of diapers. Thank punk and the Berklee Music School she isn't the folkie she would have been in an earlier counterculture. Cutting her upper-middle-class enunciation with open-tuned pitch, strange chords she can just barely play, and enough guitar noise to get the circulation going, she earns the right to steal her namesake's title. But remember, Julia: "Those who restrain desire, do so because theirs is weak enough to be restrained." A−