Beautiful Creature' and 'Total System Failure': dueling dual albums from Juliana Hatfield

Juliana Hatfield definitely has street cred: her music has appeared on the soundtracks of teen angst-fest My So-Called Life, and 20-something film, Reality Bites. She's one of those artists whose name you associate with good, early '90s indie rock, but who you can't associate with a single song.

I was given Juliana Hatfield's albums Beautiful Creature and Juliana's Pony: Total System Failure in a goody bag I received when registering for the Somerville 5K. It is an unusual gesture to be given a musical album at a road race. A gesture made even more unusual by the fact that the album contained multiple discs and is three years old.

However, local artist Juliana Hatfield, who recorded both of these albums in Cambridge, is a most unusual musician.

Beautiful Creature is mostly acoustic and consists of soft, inoffensive and apologetic songs. Juliana's Pony: Total System Failure is harder, if Juliana Hatfield's music can be described as 'hard' at all, and aims for more of a shock factor with its lyrics.

From the titles of the albums, to the names of songs, (Beautiful Creature's "Might Be in Love", "Somebody Is Waiting For Me" and Total System Failure's, "Metal Fume Failure" and "Road Wrath") to the packaging (Creature has pictures of Hatfield in a meadow, Failure uses the "ye olde punk typewriter" font and burnt edges designs), it's pretty obvious that Hatfield is going for the "good girl meets bad girl" theme.

Beautiful Creature is the kind of CD that would make a good soundtrack for a teen drama, but not the "My So-Called Life" of Hatfield's past. This album would better fit a more maudlin show like "Dawson's Creek" serving as the background to Dawson's brooding. The songs are all mellow and Hatfield's voice is always pretty -- I say "pretty" because it never becomes anything more or less than that. Hatfield doesn't ever really explore the ends of her vocal range but her voice has a girlish, childlike quality that is endearing and works on songs like "Might Be in Love."

The best songs on the album are the ones in which Hatfield doesn't layer in too many instruments and allows her voice to be fully expressive. Her soft and plaintive voice makes lines like "angels are floating down the river" ("Until Tomorrow") not so groan-inducing and actually kind of sweet. Hatfield's voice doesn't ever really cross over into rock territory but stays kind of folksy -- like old school Lisa Loeb, or Sheryl Crow before she started writing horrible songs like "Soak Up the Sun." The instrumentals fit the coffee shop feel of the album.

"Close Your Eyes" is almost a lullaby and features Hatfield's soothing voice over a rolling, melancholy bass line. The other standouts are "Hotels" with its moaning guitar and "Daniel" which features my favorite lyric on the album: "this is the sound of no money." Overall, Beautiful Creature is a solid album. There may be a lot of filler songs, but there are no songs that are truly lacking in quality.

While Beautiful Creature uses subtle music to back and emphasize the nuances of Hatfield's voice, Total System Failure accomplishes the same goal by taking an edgier path. The first "song" is a 15 second interlude of guitar distortion called "White Thrash." It's a pretty good representation of the sound of the album -- the guitar is more grating here than on Beautiful Creature.

I would have expected this harder sound to drown out Hatfield's voice, but it illuminates it in a different way than Creature did. Her voice and literate lyrics make this album different than your average rocker chick record. In "Leather Pants," Hatfield declares that she "can't be seen with a man wearing leather pants," asserting that she is the rocker, and no one's groupie. In "Houseboy," she sings "You can sleep in my bed tonight but you better not have dirty feet/and I don't like talking after I fool around; I just like to sleep."

What I want to know is what kind of rock star uses semi-colons in their lyrics? Hatfield's adolescent voice makes offensive lyrics like "Will they blame the victim/when I throw the baby in the trash?/No one said I can't do that" ("The Victim") creepy and thought-provoking. Here the limited range of her voice adds to the shallowness of the lyrics. These in turn, are broken down by the complicated backing of instrumentals, giving the entire album a dizzying sense of depth. Hatfield skillfully plays with conventions of songwriting and the result is a strong record that explores the inner workings of the mind of a modern woman rocker. Failure would fit the grittiness of "My So-Called Life" better than Creature ever would.

If we look at the two CDs as a concept album Total System Failure is a representation of what happened to the narrator in Beautiful Creature when her pleas for love and forgiveness went unanswered. I would say that Juliana's Pony: Total System Failure is a more interesting album, but Beautiful Creature is more accessible. Nonetheless, Hatfield certainly has a lot to say and finds a more poignant way of expressing it in Total System Failure than she does in Beautiful Creature.