JONI MITCHELL'S DAUGHTERS

By CHRISTOPHER JOHN FARLEY

Folk music is all over the place these days. There's Beck with his hip-hop folk, Ani DiFranco with her punk-folk, and Jewel with her sexy, wet-lipped pop-folk. Relative to that lot, the veteran duo Indigo Girls and newcomer Laura Love sound almost like folk traditionalists.

Indigo Girls have been so good for so long--they were formed in 1983--it's easy to yawn when they come out with yet another solid album. It's sort of like Michael Jordan scoring 30 points: unless he scores 50, is it really news? Still, Indigo Girls' pleasant new album, the Shaming of the Sun (Epic), represents a noteworthy step in the evolution of the pair, singer/songwriter/guitarists Amy Ray and Emily Saliers. The Girls, who are both gay (but not a couple), became more open about their sexuality a few years ago, and on Sun their music seems to have come out as well. Their past albums were concerned, in an almost solipsistic way, with their interior lives; on Shaming of the Sun, the ebb and flow of their emotions are linked more closely with happenings in the outside world.

In Shame on You, a wordy, rambunctious number that evokes early Springsteen, Ray sings of restlessly driving the roads only to be stopped by police "looking for illegal immigrants." In the piano ballad Leeds, Saliers sings of being drunk and depressed in a hotel room watching "16 black churches burning on the TV." The album is rarely preachy, and the sociological context--plus some canny rock-guitar riffs--give the Girls' music even more bite than it's used to.

Love, 37, is both a newcomer and a veteran: a well-known figure in the Seattle music scene, she's released three albums on her own, as well as a compilation on the independent label Putumayo World Music; her mostly affable new CD Octoroon (Mercury), due out May 13, is her major-label debut. Love has a voice rich with dark shadings and rural twang. She calls her music Afro/Celtic, but it's mostly front-porch folk with a few twists. One song, Simple, offers up a mix of blues harmonica and funky guitar. Her topics are very coffeehouse--there's a pro-tree song--but there's also a sharp cover of Come As You Are that remakes Kurt Cobain's anguished alternative-rock classic into a plaintive, acoustic plea for self-acceptance. At their best, Love and Indigo Girls sidestep trends and go straight to the heart.

--By Christopher John Farley