The current New York folk revival has a lot riding on this album – Suzanne Vega is the first major-label release from the new crop of Greenwich Village troubadours. But Vega – a young veteran of several Fast Folk songwriter anthology LPs – plays folk only in the largest sense of the word. Her lyric tradition barely goes as far back as the early Joni Mitchell's tangled romances and dreamy fantasias. In the opening song, "Cracking," she alternates vocally between a soft erotic plea and the impish bedtime-story tone of Laurie Anderson, daintily negotiating a Windham Hill-like arrangement of tiptoe guitars and raindrop keyboards. Vega ends the album with a wry slice of New York life à la Lou Reed, "Neighborhood Girls," backing up the punky syncopation of her sprechstimme with the funk & roll kick of a Little Feat-style band.

She employs these musical devices with a shy discretion that is heightened by the cathedrallike ambiance of the production (former Patti Smith guitarist Lenny Kaye coproduced). With words, however, she sometimes overplays her hand. Her epic intentions in "The Queen and the Soldier" are hampered by verbose medieval imagery and an obscured premise.

Vega is at her best when, as she sings in "Small Blue Thing," she is "cool and smooth and curious." "Undertow" benefits from its chilling simplicity: the light touch of strings and synth guitar are an effective contrast with her stark honesty ("I believe right now if I could/I would swallow you whole"). Stepping back in "Straight Lines" to observe a woman wrestling with her new liberation, Vega illustrates these schizophrenic throes with snappy ascending guitar chords, her voice in a bright, waifish cry, and then a melancholy descent into thoughtful harmonies and a cloudy gathering of guitars and synthesizers.

In spite of its occasional lyric riddles, Suzanne Vega is a remarkable album, because of the quiet power with which it expands the folk tradition. The hopes and prayers of the revivalists go with her, but Suzanne Vega is already leaving them far behind. (RS 451)

DAVID FRICKE