Suzanne Vega – Beauty & Crime

Suzanne Vega’s first new album in six years is ostensibly a tribute to New York (her hometown), and there are a few obvious nods to the city in its strange post-9/11, chain-store-studded, hedge-fund-monied state. “Ludlow Street” (with Lee Ranaldo on guitar, but not so’s you’d know) finds Vega walking a gussied-up Lower East Side, missing old friends and musing, “Another generation’s parties/And it is still the same old scene”.

She’s less persuasive when she drifts from the personal toward the declarative, as on the over-metaphored “New York Is A Woman” and the World-Trade-centric album closers, “Angel’s Dream” and “Anniversary”. The latter has her sounding like a greeting card: “Watch for daily braveries/Notice newfound courtesies.”

Of course, Vega has never been a songwriter of particular depth or cleverness. Instead, she has an appealing vocal coolness and a talent for mild melodies. What makes her music work, when it does, is more a matter of sonic effect — e.g., her flattened voice against the insistent rhythm of the album opener “Zephyr & I” — than lyrical heft. That’s why her two albums with ex-husband (and sonic specialist) Mitchell Froom were her best; together, they fashioned a sort of icy electro-folk that gave her inexpressiveness a reflective surface.

On Beauty & Crime, producer Jimmy Hogarth takes more of a grab-bag approach, alternating stripped-down folkish settings with orchestral flourishes and the occasional rock move. It’s a hodge-podge that doesn’t give any particular shape or identity to Vega’s would-be urban valentine, and she doesn’t help herself with clumsy think-pieces such as “Pornographer’s Dream” and “Edith Wharton’s Figurines”.