Review: Some Girls, Crushing Love

Erstwhile alt-rock It girl Juliana Hatfield’s second recording with drummer Freda Love (of the Mysteries of Life) and multi-instrumentalist Heidi Gluck (of the Only Children) as Some Girls, Crushing Love, is an album that’s sharp and insightful where her last solo record, 2005’s Made in China, was juvenile and sloppy. The album is also far more cohesive than Some Girls’s first outing, 2003’s Feel It, in that it’s clearly a collaborative effort, with all three women sharing songwriting and lead vocal duties, making Some Girls sound less like a side project and more like an actual band, despite its lo-fi aesthetic and its first-take recording sessions. While the trio isn’t going to make anyone forget the recently disbanded Sleater-Kinney, there’s an aggression and an edge to their playing—to Love’s drumming, in particular—that’s refreshing and imbues a sense of heft to the standout melodic hooks of “Poor Man’s You” and “Hooray for L.A.” That interplay comes to a head on the self-reflexive “Rock or Pop,” which addresses Hatfield’s marketability conundrum with greater wit than the whole of Made in China and which deflates the rockist-versus-popist debate currently waging in certain critics’ circles. Smart as Some Girls’s own writing might be, it’s the album’s three cover songs—the straightforward but wrenching “He’s on Drugs Again,” “Just Like That” (which an ex-boyfriend of Hatfield’s wrote about her while they were together), and “Magnetic Fields” (which gives the album its title and was written by Love’s husband)—that capture the overall tone of the album, one of cobbling together distinct, disparate elements into a whole that makes sense.