99.9F

Vega stretches to her sharpest yet Alan Jackson, Weekend Times (UK), Saturday, Sepember 12, 1992 Until the British remix duo DNA hijacked Suzanne Vega's a cappella "Tom's Diner" and transformed its Edward Hopper-like observations of Manhattan street life into one of last summer's ubiquitous dance-floor anthems, the 33-yar-old New Yorker's image was indivisible from her physical appearance: frail, pale, and interesting. The release on Monday of a fourth studio album, 99.9F, should further mutate this misleading stereotype, however. Recorded in collaboration with the rock producer Mitchell Froom, it represents her sharpest work to date, juxtaposing acoustic folk with minimal dance beats and industrial noise, ina mood of happy self-confidence. The recent single, "In Liverpool," a gently rolling ballad, provided an unhelpful flag to Vega's new direction. Its selection above several other more challenging tracks (try "Fat Man and Dancing Girl" for size, or "Blood Makes Noise") suggests that her record company may be nervous of scaring off her core audience. She herself appears to have no such qualms and seems to relish the opportunity Froom's quirky settings have given her to stretch beyond her familiar styles and concerns. "As Girls Go," a musing on sexual identity, is the perfect example: specific enough in its detail to induce a shiver, yet sympathetic and far from tasteless, it represents a balancing act that few other performers would have dared attempt, and which fewer still could have hoped to carry off so adeptly. Like 99.9F itself, it is clever, controlled, engagingly human, and helps to confirm Vega as a big-league talent. Submitted by Matthew Hsu Oh, Suzanne! Kiki Mason, Vanity Fair, October, 1992 Since Suzanne Vega's debut in 1985, her low-key melodies and quirky, lyrical observations of urban life have made the willowy New Yorker one of that most unlikely sort, a folkie star. "I always thought that I'd be discovered after I was dead," Vega says, "and the big hits, like 'Luka' or 'Tom's Diner' really surprised me." Her newest release, 99.9F (A&M Records), finds her in the slightly fevered, dreamlike state of detatchment for which she's known. But with a new sense of clarity about her purpose. "There's an undercurrent of tension and anxiety that needs to be expressed," she says about the America she sees and feels. "I want to make about where we're going, but loud speeches don't work." Happily, these songs do. Submitted by Matthew Hsu Suzanne Vega: Techno-Folk by Wayne Robins, New York Newsday, Sunday, Sept. 13, 1992 With each new album, Suzanne Vega defies expectations, exploring unexpected directions. Her new album, 99.9F, is her most surprising yet, an engaging blend of melodic pop and bruising rhythms, set off by lyrics that can be by turns eloquent and elusive. The new album is her fourth since Suzanne Vega, her 1985 debut, and her first since DNA's unauthorized remix of her unaccompanied recitation, "Tom's Diner," became a fluke street and club hit. (An entire disc of versions of "Tom's Diner" by acts around the world, called Tom's Album, followed.) That experiment took a typically minutely observant Vega lyric and grafted it to a hip-hop-derived dance track. It has encouraged her to keep stretching: 99.9F may be the first techno-folk rock album. In Mitchell Froom, Vega seems to have found the perfect producer to pull off this hybrid. Froom, who has recorded song-oriented rockers such as Richard Thompson, Los Lobos, and Crowded House, has constructed a sound full of unexpected sonic twists while staying true to the tunes. An all-star ensemble plays on many of the tracks -- David Hidalgo of Los Lobos on guitar, Bruce Thomas of Elvis Costello's Attractions on bass, Jerry Marotta (who has played with Peter Gabriel and many others) on drums, with Froom on keyboards and Vega on acoustic guitar. The tracks are full of contradictions that hang together. "Rock in this Pocket (Song of David)" has lyrics both subtle and pithy and a track that sounds like Steely Dan disco. "Blood Makes Noise" has a clangy, edgy industrial drive, and Vega sings with precision and passion: "I'm standing in a windy tunnel / Shouting through the roar / And I'd like to give the information you're asking for / But blood makes noise / I'ts a ringing in my ear." "In Liverpool" evokes the Beatles both in its setting and its music, as voluptuous surges of an "Abbey Road" guitar riff in the refrain constant with verses that contain ascetic playing more typical of Vega's earlier, folk-rooted work. That folkie side is given its due on tunes like "Blood Sings," which utilizes interesting instrumentation (including bouzouki, fretless bass, acoustic guitar), but comes off a little pale amidst so much more dynamic-sounding music. "(If You Were) in My Movie" is also understated but is a better song that highlights Vega's clear-eyed unsentimental lyricism. Another superficially conventional song, "As Girls Go," is elevated by a comically bizarre lyric: "You make a really good girl, as girls go," Vega sings, apparently addressing a transsexual. The album is is best, though, when Vega and Froom go for broke lyrically and musically. The highight is "Fat Man and Dancing Girl," which has the rhythmic cadence of a playground jumprope game, lyrics that suggest getting lost in a carnival sideshow, and musical shifts from symphonic grandeur to patches of pure Spartan restrain. Vega's assertive whisper carries the title song, while the playing on the track alternates from aggressive to recessive and back with gripping suddenness. And the title perfectly encapsulizes Vega's approach: At 99.9F, she doesn't have a raging fever, but she burns too hot to be called normal. Submitted by Matthew Hsu Suzanne Vega, 99.9F Joan Rosenbluth, Los Angeles Times, September 6, 1992 You already know the artist as the Spalding Gray of folk music, a sort of dry, clever chronicler of life in the age of urban riots and sordid celebrity custody battles. Now meet Suzanne Vega the would-be Bangle, the sly flirt, the oracle of the underside. They're all here, the familiar and the fresh on the New York singer's most wide-ranging and consistently brilliant effort to date. The most surprising song on Vega's fourth album is the hum-along "When Heroes Go Down," whose title and bouncy vigor seem purposely to evoke the Bangles' "Hero Takes a Fall." Never much one to trade on her femininity, Vega tackles another role, that of coquette, in "(If You Were) In My Movie," a fantasy laid bare with delicious results. And there is the social commentary that Vega has always done so well, and never better than here: "Bad Wisdom," perhaps about a young girl in need of an abortion, perhaps about something much less weighty; and "As Girls Go," a nudge-nudge, wink-wink tale of transsexualism. Producer Mitchell Froom's austere, off-kilter production embellishes without overshadowing Vega's will-o'-the-wisp-vocals. Submitted by Matthew Hsu (from The New York Times, Sunday, October 11, 1992; Pop Music; Recordings View) SUZANNE VEGA'S VERSION OF THE HUMAN COMEDY A quiet folk-song miniaturist places her tales of waifs, victims and abused children in a stylizied carnival atmosphere. By Stephen Holden In a pop climate of big noises and angry outcries, the folk-pop singer Suzanne Vega has always gone defiantly against the grain by writing knotty little songs about people who feel insignificant and victimized. And in "Rock in This Pocket (Song of David)," the opening cut of her new album, "99.9 Fo," she slyly addresses the problem of being a quiet folk miniaturist in a heavy-metal world by imagining herself as David to the rock world's Goliath. "What's so small to you is so large to me / If it's the last thing I do, I'll make you see," she declares in a voice that sounds demure but stubborn. By far Vega's most rewarding record, "99.9 Fo" (A&M 54005; CD and cassette) is the first album in which she breaks almost completely away from the conventions of the New York folk milieu that nurtured her. Produced by Mitchell Froom, a studio wizard with an ear for odd noises and instrumental juxtapositions, the record is filled with intriguing Dadaist clangs, clunks and honks that silhouette her ruminations in a stylized carnival atmosphere. At moments, the record recalls the junk-shop Salvation Army-band style of Tom Waits's much- admired art-rock album "Swordfishtrombones." In other places it echoes the more dissonant moments of the Beatles' "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band." The arrangements, far from distracting attention from Vega's lyrics, complement them like fanciful illustrations in a storybook. The brash colors and slap-happy rhythms set of her matter-of-fact vocal delivery and bring out her mordant humor. Not everyone, however, is likely to find Vega's version of the human comedy amusing. The narrator of "Blood Makes Noise," the first single to be released from the album, is fighting off a panic attack during a physical examination. "I'd like to give the information / But blood makes noise / It's a ringing in my ears," she explains to the doctor who is asking questions while administering what seems to be a test for the AIDS virus. As disturbing as its subtext may be, the song's musical setting -- an accelerated, pumping oom-pah-pah -- is downright jolly. "Blood Makes Noise" is one of two songs on the record with blood in the title. In "Blood Sings," the most conventionally folkish number, a child who was "left alone at birth, left to fend and taught to fight," searches for her biological parents and imagines she will instinctively recognize them if they appear. "As a Child" describes how, by drawing in the dirt and creating imaginary streets and cities, children "learn to have a life." The irony of the song is that the narrator feels more like an inanimate object than her doll, who "seems to have a secretive stare." When Vega first appeared on the folk scene with her doelike appearance, pure vibratoless alto and aura of hypersensitivity, she was mistakenly assumed to be the heir of warmblooded folk madonnas like Joan Baez, Judy Collins and Joni Mitchell. As it turned out, there is nothing at all earth-motherish in Vega's personality. Sex, when it appears in her songs, is often fraught with ambiguity and danger. The album's title song portrays romantic love as a possibly contagious fever that requires cooling. The narrator of "Bad Wisdom" is a young girl who may have been sexually molested and who has lost her friends. "What price to pay for bad wisdom?" the girl asks stoically? "As Girls Go" portrays sexuality itself as a child's guessing game. The narrator, observing a transvestite who may or may not have had a sex-change operation, remarks, "You make a really good girl, as girls go." In these fascinating songs, Vega has taken a large step in defining her artistic identity. In an age of fear and diminished expectations, the singer (whose biggest hit, "Luka," was the monologue of a battered child) has perfected a quintessentially wary, self- protective voice. Most of the characters on her new album are also weak, damaged people trying to make their way with whatever resources are available. These characters project neither the idealism nor the sense of entitlement expressed by earlier folk singers. The old dreams of true love, spiritual enlightenment, personal glory and utopian salvation barely occur to them. As they forge ahead, they share a remarkable absence of self-pity. All they really desire is a feeling of autonomy and the opportunity to face a dangerous but interesting world with their eyes wide open. (Photo with caption: Suzanne Vega -- she's defiantly against the grain.) Submitted by Steve Zwanger (from The International Guardian (The Guardian UK), Thursday, August 27, 1992; Review / Profile) Suzanne Vega was born prematurely and suffers from asthma. Listen to her songs and it shows. Her different tunes and nervy lyrics established the genre of the consumptive girl singer. Yet now Vega goes to the gym. And, Caroline Sullivan writes, her music's changing too. Portrait: Dirk Van Dooren. BRONTE SISTER WITH AN ACOUSTIC GUITAR Suzanne Vega says that rumours of her wanness are greatly exaggerated. The leading purveyor of pale bedsit pop contends that she has been consistently misundersootd. The world may construe her as diffident and droopy, but the singer insists she is made of robuster stuff. "I've got a sense of humour, for heaven's sake," she says. She even has an emergency joke: "Did you hear about the agnostic dyslexic insomniac who lies awake at night wondering if there really is a dog?" Her triumphant chortle implies that she rests her case. But wit is not what is at issue here (anyone who has heard Vega banter with a concert audience knows she is acutely funny). What we are talking about is the bits between the badinage -- the music. Vega's understated glimpses into other people's lives are nothing if not limp-wristed (fans call them subtle). The songs and their softly-spoken creator provoke amazingly animated reactions. Admirers swoon over the allegedly dark humour and sharp insights. Detractors counter by pointing out that it was Vega who influenced people like Tracy Chapman to strap on a guitar. Neither have they forgotten DNA's remix of Vega's Tom's Diner. Welded to a techno beat, the thing was irritation in excelsis. Browsing through her work, it seems there is a case for the prosecution. Take Small Blue Thing, a tune on the 1985 debut LP, Suzanne Vega. It begins: "Today I am a small blue thing / Like a marble or an eye." One hopes she had the grace to blush when she wrote that. Or there is the title track of 1987's Solitude Standing: "She turns to me with her hand extended / Her palm is split with a flower, with a flame." Granted, these examples are plucked out of context. They do not negate the fact that, when she is in the mood, Vega is a superb chronicler of urban life. Her street sketches are dazzling decoctions of Springsteen-style romanticism, Elmore Leonard-style grit and wholly Vega detachment. Ironbound, with its description of "Portuguese women on Avenue L", is one-such item. Neighborhood Girls, a nostalgic paean to a prostitute, is another. How irksome, then, that the bulk of Vega's repertoire is of the little-blue-marble stripe. Worse, her success launched the genre of the consumptive girl singer. Suddenly every listless type prone to bouts of 3 am sleeplessness was writing songs and, more disturbingly, recording them. Record labels have mined this fertile seam with various degrees of credibility. Most shocking was Tanita Tikaram, the 18-year-old wunderbard from Basingstoke. Tikaram once broodingly remarked: "Leonard Cohen -- how can anyone live without this man?" That one must haunt her. The music-business enthusiasm for the melancholy-little-girl is still unchecked. The past few months alone have brought Tori Amos and Sophie B. Hawkins. Vega must consider herself to be generations removed from it all, but one trusts she feels penitent. Having said that, it could be time for a reassessment of Suzanne Vega. Her fourth album, 99.9 oF, is a major departure for the Manhattan songwriter. Her passion for clean, economical arrangements has been superseded by a fascination with noises. 99.9 oF is vibrant with guitars and percussion and, for the first time, Vega projects to the back row. By anyone else's standards the record is a delicate, insular affair, but by Vega's standards it is practically speed metal. With the help of Elvis Costello / Crowded House producer Mitchell Froom, Vega has transformed herself from fey folkteuse to sophisticated rockiste. "I just decided it was time to play about with some different music," Vega explains. It should be said that she does not look much like a nascent rock chick. Enveloped in a black dress that accentuates her slightness, she appears much younger than her 33 years. Her pallor suggests that no-one has ever had to warn her about staying out of the sun. With a different haircut, she could be a Bronte heroine. It transpires that Vega's translucent look is due to ill health rather than artistic temperament. She was born prematurely and copes with congenital asthma and bronchitis. Somewhere along the way she also suffered whiplash and has had back problems ever since. "It's only recently that I've begun to feel healthy," she discloses. "I've been working out at the gym and I'm more happy and mobile than I've ever been before. I can *do* stuff now. I took a train trip across America a while ago and I carried my own bags and got the bed down from the wall. "Before, I always got winded easily. I was always tired. I felt it almost as a psychic thing. I used to get so angry at it that I'd punish myself by walking from home on 102nd Street to school on 42nd Street." References to New York dot Vega's conversation. She is as inextricably identified with her city as those other quintessential Manhattanites, Lou Reed and Woody Allen. Unlike Reed and Allen, Vega is drained by the city's great synergism. Her exhaustion and consequent quiet apartness are the linchpins of her music. Vega songs condense New York to a neighbourhood-sized morsel of avenues, diners and hookers. Her ability to bring it to life is her main talent. "My mother was a Midwesterner and she married my Puerto Rican stepfather, which must have been a radical move in 1960," Vega says musingly. "I grew up uptown -- 102nd and Broadway, 109th Street." The place names are enunciated distinctly, like charms. "My mother had four kids before the age of 24 and I just remember pandemonium." Suzanne's stepfather, Ed Vega, was a novelist and an intellectual. Suzanne's early years were informed by street fighting, Camus and existentialism. "I was quiet and I had trouble saying things. I was better at writing them down. I had a sense of something being missing, which I think was my father." It is not surprising that she finds anger difficult to deal with. As a child, she expressed it physically: "If someone hit me, I hit back, hard." Today, she still has trouble "being angry verbally. I've thrown stuff. But I'm learning to use my mouth better. I was very much outside things when I was young, but it was on purpose. "I developed a strong sense of my own uniqueness and I had this idea that everyone else is unique. That gets me in trouble sometimes, because I'll spend hours talking to some guy, thinking *he's* unique, and then I'll find out he isn't." Do men feel protective toward her? "Sometimes. But mostly they think I'm sarcastic. It takes a long time before they get through the door." Vega progressed from withdrawn child to intense adolescent. At the High School of Performing Arts, she studied dance -- a perverse choice, given her chronic fatigue -- and stepped out with a trombone student. The other boys found her intimidating. "I wasn't a big dater. I didn't have a reputation for being a good time. Guys knew if they talked to me we'd end up discussing religion or death or something. It wasn't till my early twenties that I developed social skills. I didn't realize that you don't go up to people at parties and tell them everything about yourself." At 20, at the height of punk, Vega discovered folk music. She travelled downtown to Greenwich Village's legendary Folk City club. Drinking beer among the beards, she felt she had found her niche. She channelled her intensity into songwriting and the rest has been platinum albums and a legion of imitators. Committed Vegaphobes may find it difficult to hate the new album. At any rate, they won't be able to level charges of tweeness. The songs contain some of Vega's most striking imagery: blood, doctors, disease. The pictures they create are obscure and distressing. There is a sense that Vega is divulging secret secrets. What is she on about? Bad Wisdom commences, ominously, "Mother, the doctor knows something is wrong". On Blood Makes Noise, Vega says, "I'd like to help you, doctor, but the din in my head, it's too much." Suzanne is evasive. "It's for the listener to interpret." They all say that. She relents. "Bad Wisdom could be ("could be"? Doesn't she know?) about pregnancy or AIDS or anything. It's about a girl talking to her mother and being frustrated by not getting an answer. A lot of girls feel betrayed by their mothers because they can't talk to them. My mother thinks every girl will be able to relate to that song." Your correspondent ventures that some of the music seems rather morbid. Vega claims that I am missing the humour, which is certainly true. "It's dry humour. The way things are handled, the perspective. Like in When Heroes Go Down, the way it blasts in and out." Oh, *that* humour. Conspicuously absent from are thirtysomething topics like babies and aging. Vega says she would rather write about them when they happen. "I think about death, but I ignore aging. I'm aware that I'm older and changing physically, but I don't mind. I've never defined myself as a pretty person because, for a long time, I wasn't. I'd rather have character, like Georgia O'Keeffe." Vega has worked hard for the past year. She appeared at the 1991 WOMAD festival and contributed a song to the subsequent Sounds of WOMAD album. (Her offering, the 1985 LP track Some Journey, quails in the hearty company of Kanda Bongo Man and Toumari Diebate.) The recording of 99.9 oF consumed months. Now there are great gobs of promotion chores to surmount before she can go home and put on her cashmere dressing gown. The dressing gown perfectly epitomises Vega's reserved nature. It is been her one big pop star extravagance to date. Modest as it (relatively) is, she still feels compelled to justify it. "I could've bought terry cloth, but I figured cashmere would last longer." She admits to a weakness for silk underwear. The woman is damnably likeable. It's nearly 8 pm and Vega, who has tickets for the theatre, has missed the curtain. "Aaah," she shrugs in New Yorkese. She slips into a crusting leather jacket that must have been wrested from a Hell's Angel. As she wisps from the room, she seems smaller than ever. Not unlike a marble, in fact. 99.9 oF is released by A&M on September 7. Submitted by Steve Zwanger Suzanne Vega 99.9F Alan Jackson, Vox, October, 1992 Unlikely as asuch an outcome may have seemed at the time of its release in 1985, Vega's self-titled debut album proved to be one of the decade's seminal releasese, its successful refocusing of folk and singer-songwriting traditions opening one of the most relentlessly-mined seamse of popular music in the following few years. For a while, the New Yorker with the voice as cool and detatched as bossa nova queen detached as bossa nova queen Astrud Gilberto (and a lyrical talent best characterised by the same two adjectives) was dogged by comparisons to the seemingly endless stream of new female artists who released albums in her wake. Seven years on, only Vega among them has maintained the momentum of her career, and with this fourth studio album takes such a decisive step forward that she can no longer be sidelined as an artist of minority appeal. Presided over by Mitchell Froom (Elvis Costello, The Pretenders, Richard Thompson), 99.9F comes complete with a library of production sounds: industrial clattering and banging, Attractions-type rock romps, robust pop and the purest of acoustic guitar settings. The multitude of textures counterpoints the best writing Vega has done to date -- unforced, endlessly inventive and, through the inclusion of the funny-uncomfortable 'As Girls Go', encompassing the perfect alternative pop song. Submitted by Matthew Hsu Suzanne Vega 99.9F Andrew Collis, Select (UK), October 1992 Ever since her debut single Suzanne Vega has been top dog in an ever-growing pound of Joni Mitchell imitators -- ethereal strumming and squeaky voices a specialty. Careers have certainly been built and sustained on far less, but her successful brush with DNA appears to hav energised the singer into trying something a little, well, different. if not full blown funk, perhaps, then certainly a mild case of the good groove. Skillfully guided by the production of Mitchell Froom (Crowded House, Costello), this album sees Vega experimenting in turn with the quirky ('Fatman And The Dancing Girl' [sic]), the tragic ('Bad Wisdom') and the downright sinister ('99.9F'). Most surprisingly an actual, real-life rock 'n' roll band is ushered in for the excellent Byrdsy pop of 'When Heroes Go Down'. Even when Vega reverts to the have-guitar-will-whine approach ('Song Of Sand'), it seems far less jarring amid such varied company. Not so much ahead of the pack as runnning a different race altogether. Submitted by Matthew Hsu The New York Review of Records Vol. 2 No. 7, December 1992/ January 1993 Jeremy Helligar "Suzanne Vega" Don't let the deadpan vocals or innocent gaze fool you. Suzanne Vega is a contained maelstrom looking for a place to uncork. The pop-folkie's latest album, "99.9Fo" (A&M), strongly hints at the whirlwind brewing beneath Vega's tranquil exterior. The singer-songwriter strikes a decidedly edgier pose on the new album - hair fire-colored, hand over mouth, fingers parted. Hers is no longer the wimpy voice framed by unimposing acoustic guitars. "That edge has always been there," says Vega of her tougher image. "But maybe the circumstances weren't right to bring it out. There are all kinds of things that lie beneath the surface of what I seem to be." "99.9Fo" presents her lurking in strange corners. On the New Wavish "Blood Makes Noise," Vega's layered vocals are muted in the background. "That's what the inside of my head sounds like," she says. The cacophonous production flourishes of 99.9Fo have been dubbed Industrial-Folk. But not all of the album is such a departure: Vega offers brooding sentimentality with a vaguely similar Industrial backdrop ("In Liverpool"), playfulness (the Beatlesque "Fat Man and Dancing Girl"), and cross-dressing satire ("As Girls Go"). Brimming with sexuality,"If You Were in My Movie" is a companion piece to the ear-turning title song. "That's a flirting song about looking at someone and feeling that things are slightly hotter than normal but not a fever." The British group DNA's 1990 Hip-Hop treatment of Vega's a cappella breakfast tale "Tom's Diner" raised eyebrows and expectations. And disappointing sales of Vega's previous album, Days of Open Hand, along with the emergence of a whole new set of neo-folkie upstarts, signaled the need for artistic definition. "I guess I was feeling a little reckless," Vega says of her chameleon turn. "I'm 33 years old now, and I feel like if I didn't make this big jump, I'm never gonna do it. Probably I'll just get stranger and stranger as I go along," she says. "More and more unusual, more and more unpredictable. I'll be wearing even stranger outfits on those records." "Suzanne Vega Defies Expectations with Daring 99.9Fo" Winston-Salem Journal, Saturday, September 26, 1992 Ed Bumgardner In 1985, Suzanne Vega emerged from the neo-folk pack to become a sovereign symbol of urban folk intellect. By her third album, the lackluster "Days of Open Hand," Ms. Vega was showing signs of diminishing vision. her brittle arrangements and erudite sensitivity, once so fresh and stimulating, suddenly sounded bland and predictable. Ms. Vega's new album, "99.9Fo," produced by Mitchell Froom, finds Ms. Vega whirling away from formula and expectation to embrace the artful peculiarities of abstract invention. Froom and Ms. Vega have created a dizzying album -- the aural equivalent of a carnival fun house -- that uses eccentricity and distorted imagery to challenge the limitations of folk music. Working from an acoustic foundation, Froom underscores Ms. Vega's poetic narratives with sparse, altered-state arrangements that fuse poplike melody with understated grooves. In the hands of such skilled players as Froom, drummer Jerry Marotta, bassist Pete Thomas and guitarists David Hidalgo and Richard Thompson, conventional instrumentation is approached in unconventional ways. Intriguing melodies are augmented by stinging splashes of industrial clangor. Subtle bursts of harmonic noise blend into layers of keyboards and samples. Elliptical melodies intertwine with Ms. Vega's vocal lines. Whether adding sting to folk form ("Blood Sings," "Song of Sand") or bringing depth to pop convention ("In Liverpool," "When Heroes Go Down"), Froom's arrangements remain uncluttered, imaginative and supportive, and, juxtaposed against the detached cool of Ms. Vega's songs, filled with literate prose and strong imagery, question the veracity of perception as they probe the dimensions of reality. Such tracks as "Rock In This Pocket (Song of David)," "As A Child" and "Fat Man and Dancing Girl" use simplistic metaphor to deal with the power of illusion and the potential ramifications of one's perception of reality. Several songs use the power of imagery to exude an intriguing, parabolic air of mystery. "Bad Wisdom" is a story of a girl in dire trouble, perhaps pregnant; Ms. Vega's fragmented observations capture the alienation that accompanies loss of innocence. "Mother your eyes have gone suddenly cold And it wasn't what I was expecting Once I did think I would find comfort there And instead you've gone hard and suspecting What price to pay for bad wisdom." "As Girls Go" examines sexual ambiguity -- maybe androgyny, maybe transexualism -- in a voice that juggles humor, disdain, respect and curiosity. "Doesn't matter to me which side of the line you happen to be at any given time. You make a really good girl as girls go." And "Blood Makes Noise" is a tale of fear and confusion that could be a wry confusion that could be a wry examination of paranoia -- or a snapshot of the moment at which man faces his mortality. Ms. Vega's subtle sense of humor tempers her neuroses. With assistance from Froom "99.9 Fo" -- a clever examination of the indecision that marks blossoming passion -- slyly echoes Keith's 1967 single "98.6." And "(If You Were) In My Movie" is a cleverly flirtatious portrait of role playing, voyeurism and seduction. "If you were in my movie, I'd have you as the doctor and her throat If you were in my movie, you could be the detective... Examine her for motive, investigate the scene..." 99.9Fo is a daring work of diversity and invention that expands upon the stylistic nuances and compositional intellect that defines Ms. Vega's finest work. But this is not so much the sound of reinvention as creative sleight of hand, an illusion designed to stimulate the imagination and spark intellect. In art, as in life, things are not always what they seem to be. "Suzanne Vega 99.9Fo" Rolling Stone, October 1, 1992 Josef Woodard 3 1/2 stars Seven years and, now, three potent albums after her debut, Suzanne Vega is in a kind of sovereign position; her influence can be detected in many a female singer-songwriter. Meanwhile, she forges ahead, gaining a slow, steady momentum, expanding on her elliptical songcraft, stirring in new textures and tactics. And 99.9Fo is an apt title -- higher temperature than normal, but just shy of a fever. Itis slightly hotter in terms of production tack than her last album, "Days of Open Hand" (1990). This time, Vega detours into new levels of pop and puckishness, while always returning to her poetic stance. Her cool, understated voice is as subtle as her imagery, which refuses to meet subjects head-on, preferring the power of suggestion and paradox. Vega has been stretching beyond her folk roots. Her acoustic guitar remains the mainstay of her sound, but the overall approach is spicier - its funky painterliness is reminiscent of Sam Phillips's "Cruel Inventions." Producer Mitchell Froom works up an artful clangor. He and Vega invoke striking postpop inventiveness on "Fat Man and Dancing Girl" and "(If You Were) In My Movie" and go Celtic by way of Jupiter on "As a Child." The degree of infectiousness on the album is, for Vega, unprecedented, but dour realizations about the songs often sink in after her hooks have hooked you. The specter of AIDS reises grimly through the picturesque "Blood Makes Noise," told from the perspective of a recently diagnosed victim too dizzy to think straight. In shadowy waltz time, iBad Wisdomi too unfolds its story about a victim torn from innocence and a mother's love. It's not clear whether the title tune refers to passion or infection. Not everything on the album works. As ear tingling as "Rock in This Pocket (Song of David)" is, the David's-eye view of Goliath fails to excite much symbolic resonance. "When Heroes Go Down" might have pop written all over it were it not for words like equivocate and the canny verbal avalanche of the bridge. The album closes ona note of sad benediction with "Song of Sand," on which Vega's dark guitar apreggios are garnished with spare bits of string quartet. Vega wonders, almost prayerfully, "What stinging tune/Could split this endless noon/ And make the sky swell with rain." Vega's tunes, as usual, prove to be at once stinging and soothing. Sonically venturesome and marked by rare poetic depth, 99.9 Fo is yet another deeply rewarding chapter in Vega's artistic saga. "The Top Tens" Sunday Newsday - The Long Island Newspaper, January 3, 1993 Wayne Robins Has it been strange for you, too? Choosing a 10-best albums list was more difficult for me than it's been in years. For one thing, a preponderance of albums that led the once-alternative rock insurgency that had the biggest impact in 1992 -- by Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Red Hot Chili Peppers -- were carryovers from 1991. And some longtime mainstream stars who have made my list in years past -- Bruce Springsteen, Prince, Michael Jackson, Madonna, Peter Gabriel and Lindsey Buckingham -- didn't live up to artistic or commercial expectations. Other verterans, of course, not only did their jobs but reached new peaks. 3. Suzanne Vega, "99.9 F" (A&M). The pulsating rhythms had us describing Vega's latest as "techno-folk," but what makes this fly is her songs, some of which manage to be simultaneously assertive and austere. On the track "Blood Makes Noise" she really finds her rock voice: It's a little industrial, but to hear your blood make noise, your heart has to be working overtime. "Heavy Mental" Entertainment Weekly, September 18, 1992 David Browne On 99.9 Fo, singer-songwriter Suzanne Vega raises the mercury on what had threatened to become a lingering malaise and puts the edge back into her music. Things go more than just bump in the night on Suzanne Vega's utterly beguiling fourth album, 99.9 Fo (A&M). New York's artiest folksinger sounds as if she's stumbled upon a deranged calliope band playing in a scrapyard and joined in. Keyboards sound like blasts from a steam pipe; the clanking percussion replicates the sound of someone kicking around an empty bottle. If there isn't yet such a rubric as "industrial folk," then Vega and her new producer, Mitchell Froom, have just invented it. In other words, 99.9 Fo doesn't sound like anything Vega has done before - and it couldn't have come at a better time. Her eponymous 1985 debut album still stands as a bristle, evocative mix of singer-songwriter sensitivity and urban imagery, as does her 1987 hit, "Luke." But weak songs and watercolor production marred Vega's last album, "Days of Open Hand;" suddenly she seemed in danger of losing her cutting edge. Thankfully, 99.9 Fo restores tension to her music. The songs - her most consistent batch since her debut - are obsessively neurotic and restless. In them, parents and doctors give bad advice or can't help at all; on the churchly "In Liverpool," Vega wanders about the town seemingly in a daze while vaguely pondering a soured affair. She still has her folkish side, heard on the delicate "Blood Sings," about coming face-to-face with a long- lost relative. But the album also has moments of low-key humor ("[If You Were] In My Movie") and, in "As Girls Go," a deft put-down nearly on a par with Bob Dylan's "Positively 4th Street." What holds the album together are its clangorous, eccentric arrangements, which seem to take their cue from DNA's dance remix of Vega's "Tom's Diner." They're the perfect counterpart to Vega's cool, cautious delivery. "Blood Makes Noise," for example, combines her voice with a grinding synthesizer to perfectly emphasize lines like "The din in my head/ It's too much and it's no good." If the sound of thoughts rattling around in one's head could be captured on tape, that clatter would be 99.9 Fo. Sometimes it gets a little noisy - and very stimulating - up there. A Submitted by Mary-Margaret Little and Matthew Hsu Review: 99.9F - CD Review Magazine, November, 1992 by David Okamoto [rating: 4/5 stars] (Copyright 1992 by Music Publishing, Inc.) Executive Producer: Ronald K. Fierstein Producer: Mitchell Froom Engineered and mixed by Tchad Blake A&M 31454 0005-2 (AAD) 1992 Total disc time: 37:20 After the critical and commercial flop of 1990's Days of Open Hand, Suzanne Vega had nothing to lose. That's the only explanation for the sonic quirks and defiant stance of 99.9F, a fascinating comeback album that boasts both her weirdest and prettiest music to date. On past albums, Vega's gift for bridging mystical dreaminess and harsh reality was hampered by her presentation, which often suffered from folkie redundancy and art-rock pretension. But producer Mitchell Froom, fresh from shaking Los Lobos out of its roots-rock rut on the fabulous Kiko - heightens the haunting elegance of her wispy voice with offbeat arrangements fueled by sound effects, keyboards, fuzzy, distorted guitars, and clanging, rattling percussion that rises to a near-industrial cacophony on "Blood Makes Noise," a hypnotic rap about a patient imploring her psychiatrist to stop the sounds in her head. Despite moments that recall everyone from Ministry to Tom Waits (especially the Rickie Lee Jones-goes-to-Twin Peaks swing of "Fat Man and Dancing Girl"), 99.9F isn't just a stylistic playground. The usually wordy Vega has learned how to write concise, albeit abstract, vignettes that barely exceed three minutes, whether she's taking an artistic, David-and-Goliath stand against the greed-fueled music industry on "Rock in This Pocket" ("What's so small to you/ is so large to me/ if it's the last thing I do/ I'll make you see"), or questioning the Persian Gulf War on "Song of Sand" and the jangling, Searchers-like "When Heroes Go Down." That discipline also carries over to her more traditional folk songs, including the gorgeous, waltz-flavored "In Liverpool" and the chilling, childlike "Bad Wisdom" (about a young rape victim who throws her mother's advice back in her face). But the most encouraging sign of progress is the flicker of humor that surfaces on "Blood Makes Noise" and "As Girls Go," an ode to a transvestite ("If I could pull this off/ would I know for certain/ the real situation behind the curtain") capped by Richard Thompson's spooky guitar solo that suggests Vega may finally have learned that being a serious artist doesn't mean you have to take yourself so seriously. Submitted by Rob Walters