juliana hatfield: there’s always another girl

Lindsay Lohan might not have played muse to many musicians, but between her very public indiscretions and the media baying for her self-destructive blood she has gained a supporter in indie-pop darling Juliana Hatfield. Following last year’s largely acoustic, patchy Peace & Love, Hatfield has plugged back in to craft an album around the concept of failure – particularly that of a woman in the public eye – finding enough mileage in the subject for a full fourteen songs. The result is yet another Hatfield recording that sparkles as often as it grates, but one that contains some of her best work in a decade.

Having made her name producing sardonic jangle-pop tunes with sometimes uncomfortably honest lyrics, Hatfield has wisely gone back to those roots for There’s Always Another Girl. Recapturing the golden-age of ’90s female-fronted indie, the album feels startlingly retro at times. Songs like the misnomered ‘Don’t Wanna Dance’ are lively throwbacks, full of carefree spirit. “Why can’t you see that it’s not easy for me to be me?” sings Hatfield as though she were having the time of her life, the slack electric guitar line strung out above the jittery drums giving the song a hint of awkward charm.

The title track, inspired by Lohan’s fall from grace, is a slightly bluesy affair with all the intimacy of coffeehouse folk. Beginning with a slow, plodding drum beat, cymbal crashes insert a little drama as the song swells. “People love it when a beautiful woman self-destructs / like a tiger in a cage or a bug under glass / people point but don’t touch,” complains Hatfield with such gentleness that her point isn’t unnecessarily laboured. Even when the song veers towards a soapbox diatribe on the unfair standards women are often subject to, Hatfield has such a concise way with words and an elegance about her delivery that she saves any blushes.

The synth-based songs here are a bit of a mixed bag, with the droning, sour-voiced ‘Batteries’ at the more unpleasant, less listenable end. Hatfield makes an odd decision in presenting two versions of one of the album’s less spectacular songs: the first (‘Candy Wrappers’) a synth-and-drum pop song and the second (‘And Again’) a slower, heavier, guitar-laden reprise. The chorus is as irritating as it is irritatingly catchy, but of the two ‘And Again’ is the stronger piece. Other tracks such as ‘Taxicab’ and ‘Failure’ have positive qualities but don’t quite hit the mark, fading into the background as a result. ‘Wasting Time’ is a late highlight, offering a folksy change of pace with a delightful key change in the chorus, but best of all is the Pavement-styled ‘Sex & Drugs’, where funky guitar licks wail unpredictably above Hatfield at her coltish best, laid out over a shaky drum beat.

Though undoubtedly a marked improvement over her previous album, There’s Always Another Girl is still a strange and fitful beast. At times it feels as though Hatfield’s beloved band The Blake Babies had never left us, at others it feels drab and unfocused. “There are thousands of guitars all over the world,” she sings on the closing track, but hers simply doesn’t stand out from the crowd as boldly as it should a dozen albums down the line.

[Ye Olde Records; August 30, 2011]

Written by: Terry Mulcahy

Tags: juliana hatfield, lindsay lohan, there's always another girl

This entry was posted on Monday, August 8th, 2011 at 8:50 am and is filed under albums & EPs, reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.