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Something about Juliana Hatfield’s pure, tough, yet girlish voice, and simple lyrics and melodies made heartbreak seem less like a cliché and more like so much sad, pretty music. Records like Only Everything werethe perfect soundtrack to sunny-day car trips, with their satisfying rock chord progressions, hooky but always lo-fi in production. Her latest effort with her band Some Girls falls short of these successes. The best songs, like ‘Poor Man’s You’ are simply reenactments of what has worked in the past. Further down the list, ‘Partner in Crime’ has a guitar intro identical to Shawn Colvin’s ‘Sunny Came Home.’ It gets even worse when bandmates Heidi Gluck and Freda Love take on lead vocals, the former sounding over-processed and adult-contemporary, the latter putting to use a dubiously raspy tone. ‘Social Control’ manages to recapture some of Juliana’s deliciously immature petulance, but on the whole, the record teeters on the edge of watered-down pop, produced by a man who used to play with Meredith Brooks.
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