1. Amy Ray: Vocals & Guitar
2. Emily Saliers: Vocals & Acoustic Guitar

Indigo Girls are a duo of folk-rock vocalists whose work at its core relies on vocal harmonies and acoustic guitar, but they've added more elements to their music as their albums have evolved. Emily Saliers has a more traditional female voice - not perhaps as high as Joni Mitchell's, but up there - while Ray has a lower, rawer voice, so they play off each other very well. Likewise, Saliers tend to write more upbeat, melodic songs, while Ray's music tends to be moodier. Yes, this is a group of which fans tend to argue which member is superior; my choice is Emily, by the way!

Indigo Girls
© 1989, CBS Records, Produced by Scott Litt

The duo had released an independent album, Strange Fire, prior to this, but it's not especially notable. Indigo Girls, however, can lay a claim to being one of the great folk-rock albums. Of course, the single "Closer To Fine" has gotten extensive airplay, and is typical of the challenging-cynicism-to-come-through-okay-on-the-other-side nature of many of their songs. It's one of Saliers' pieces; she tends to write the more pop-oriented tracks.

By contrast, "Blood And Fire" (one of Ray's) is widely regarded as the most powerful of the duo's songs, as a slow, gloomy song about love, despair and loneliness.

Of course, the pair can rock, too, as they do on "Land of Canaan" (another of Ray's), which moves right along until its very last note. "Center Stage" works very well on that count, too, although it exposes the pair's tendencies to perhaps get a little too wound up in their clever lyrics.

If there's a bad track on the album, it's "Tried To Be True", which is a rather transparent piece which appears to rip off the guitar riff from "Don't Let Go The Coat" by The Who. But otherwise there's not really a loser among the lot. "Love's Recovery" is also worthy of note, as a gentle song which effectively deals with its subject matter; a sort of counterpoint to and incendiary "Blood and Fire".

Ray and Saliers added more prominent percussion to their arrangements with this album, and it's evident in the upbeat "Hammer And A Nail" and "Watershed". Nomads Indians Saints is pretty firmly Emily's album, as those two songs are hers ("Hammer" was the single"), and the best material among the rest is also hers, such as the quiet "You And Me Of The 10,000 Wars" and "Girl With The Weight Of The World In Her Hands".

By contrast, Amy's "Welcome Me" feels too much like a redux of "Secure Yourself" from the previous album, and "Pushing The Needle Too Far" seems just too forced. Her best song on the album is "1 2 3" which she wrote with The Ellen James Society, and it really just a simple rock tune and clearly a vehicle to help get the other group noticed.

I saw the duo in concert shortly after the release of this album.

This album took a beating in the music press for being too over-orchestrated and overwrought and just over-whatever-came-to-mind, which I think is a shame since it spends more time in my CD player than any other Indigo Girls album. It's really very good.

The album does have more complex, lusher arrangements, but I don't think the basic power of the pair's songs is lost in all this. Peter Collins tends to be a very clear producer, which probably helped, and the basic material is very strong.

Amy Ray bounces back from her relatively weak tracks on Nomads Indians Saints to kick off the album with the mesmerizing "Three Hits". Emily Saliers then provides the upbeat "Galileo" back-to-back with the achingly melancholy lost-love song "Ghost".

Amy also tries her hand at straight rock, and it turns out very well, as "Jonas and Ezekial" and "Chickenman" show. But Emily seems to be a little ahead of her, as her meaty "Virginia Woolf" is perhaps the standout of the whole album in arrangement and subject matter. There are several other outstanding tracks, but the best is "Let It Be Me", which is perhaps rather saccharine in its lyrics, but the music and vocal harmonies are so moving it's easy to overlook that. On the whole, the album is a pure triumph.

Mysteriously, the duo went from their best album to their worst. Swamp Ophelia is an utterly muddled and uninspired piece of work, whose singles were "Least Complicated" and "Power Of Two", both lyrically extremely transparent and musically quite bland. None of the other tracks are any better, and all sound pretty much the same as any other. All of this is rather baffling given that the producer is the same. It was also mysteriously released in a paper - rather than plastic - sleeve.