Juliana Hatfield HEY BABE (25TH ANNIVERSARY VINYL REISSUE)

Personnel: Juliana Hatfield (vocals, guitar, horns, bass); John Wesley Harding (vocals); Evan Dando (vocals, guitar); Mike Leahy, Clay Tarver, Gary Smith, Michael Wegner, Chick Graning (guitar); Mike Watt (bass); Todd Philips, Paul Trudeau (drums).
Recorded at Fort Apache Studios, Cambridge, Massachusetts.
On her first solo album Juliana Hatfield retains the minimal guitar-driven pop sound she'd perfected over five years with Boston's Blake Babies. She even goes so far as to re-record "Nirvana" from that band's final EP, ROSY JACK WORLD. This more aggressive version sounds positively triumphant in the face of the galvanizing worldwide success the Blake Babies had achieved in the year since the song's first appearance.
The rest of the album is as solid as "Nirvana," with the infectious singles "Everybody Loves Me But You," "I See You," and the lyrically disturbing but wildly catchy "Forever Baby" standing out. The album's centerpiece is "Ugly," a haunting acoustic track with plain-spoken lyrics of self-hatred, a theme to which Hatfield returned many times at this stage in her career--often to much controversy. HEY BABE is a strong start to the second chapter of Hatfield's career.

• Genre: Rock
• Format: Vinyl