Call Suzanne Vega uneasy listening. Beneath the pretty, acoustic-based melodies on her debut album, Suzanne Vega, released two years ago, was a series of impressionistic images: a jilted lover crying in a hallway ("Knight Moves"), a framed photograph acting as a caustic observer of the narrator's love life ("Marlene on the Wall"), someone walking shellshocked through a park ("Cracking"). Add to...

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...

With each new album, Suzanne Vega gets stronger. Days of Open Hand is her hardest and loveliest music yet; it is distinguished by a prayerful intensity and a clean, sharp intelligence that announce a young artist fully come into her own.

Suzanne Vega, the singer-songwriter's 1985 debut, was all watercolor suggestiveness. Its pastel tunes sketched out keener melodies to come, and its lyrics –...