Ladyhawke, Ladyhawke
Featured Album
Nervy New Zealander offers a dozen-plus rewrites of "Bette Davis Eyes." And, yes, that's a good thing
Some artists are content to merely evoke the '80s, but Pip Brown opts instead to mimic it outright. The opening of her debut as Ladyhawke — name taken from, you guessed it, an '80s movie — sounds like "Heart of Glass," ('78, but you get the point) and the remainder plays like a freewheeling shuffle through the back catalogs of Cyndi Lauper and Belinda Carlisle.
If you read this as a bad thing, you're being too harsh. Brown's not just a good stylist but a gifted songwriter — it's just that any one of those songs could have been written twenty or so years go. "My Delirium" is all pulse and snap, toothy Gang of Four guitar sinking deep into sugary synths. "Another Runaway" has the best pre-chorus since "The Lady in Red," a string of cascading "oh, oh, oh"s gliding into a supremely pouty refrain. Keyboards provide the backbone of these songs — bright, glimmering synths that blink and blurt and provide the perfect backdrop for Brown's husky voice. And even if at times it seems like Brown's main aim is to spin off a dozen or so rewrites of "Bette Davis Eyes," she does it with such vigor and determination that it's hard to fault her.
At times it's tempting to play spot-the-reference. The silvery synths streaking up the back of "Professional Suicide" are so similar to Gary Numan they could coax greedy grins from the lawyers at Beggar's. But just when the whole enterprise threatens to topple across the line from homage into Xerox, Brown leans into the microphone and sings, "I see you had a hit in '89/ Too bad we all don't age as good as wine." Her intent, then, is obvious: she has come not to honor her forefathers, but to replace them.
