Review - Beauty & Crime - Record Collector Magazine (UK) Aug 2007

The latest edition of the glossy UK magazine Record Collector carries a review of Beauty & Crime which, together with some brief Q&As, takes up the left-hand side of page 96.

At the top there is one of the 'lacy' photos of Suzanne:

 which carries the caption Chantilly Lace and a Pretty Face: Suzanne's Beauty & Crime 

and the review follows with:

Suzanne Vega

Beauty & Crime

4 Stars

Simply, her finest album to date

Never the most prolific of recording artists, Beauty & Crime is the first album from New York's queen of folk-pop in six years, and only her seventh since establishing herself as an intelligent and erudite singer-songwriter with 1985's elegant Marlene On The Wall.

Her work since has had something of an uneven texture to it, being sometimes smooth and affecting, other times experimental and affected.  This latest album, however, is warm and layered and beats with a genuine heart.  Its songs are a glorious fusion of vibrancy and wistful melancholia that trawls the streets of Vega's beloved city, surveying its bohemian urgency and its dilapidated old-world charms in equal measures.

Describing and delineating her surroundings, Vega turns to personal joys - the love of her daughter and her new husband; the time spent conversing with legendary graffiti artist Zephyr while wandering on West End Avenue - and to darker moments of tragedy sharply focused.  Anniversary movingly touches on both the city's loss on 9/11 and, more intimately, the recent passing of her own brother.  In capturing the characters and weighing history of New York, Beauty & Crime is so good they should have named it twice.

Ian Abrahams