With a nice, pure, innocent voice, Vicky Pratt Keating takes a gentle approach to building an acoustic sound that's part folk, part pop, part country, and quite reminiscent of Nanci Griffith's work, particularly the early work. Her melodies are clean and catchy, and her choruses round out the melodies without going too far out of their range. Her vocals are handled with control and easy styling so that she isn't ever overworking a song for undue effect. All of Blue Apples is a display of control and taste, from the instrumentation to the lyrics.

What separates Keating from Nanci Griffith is her ease of manner. The songs here roll by unpretentiously and comfortably. Keating has an easy air that gives her work considerable sunshine, and the instrumental backing is unforced enough to back up that sunshine feeling. Even when Keating develops a slow, hypnotic melody like "Shoot For the Moon," her vocals do not try to create darkness; they do develop the modal simplicity that the piano, some strings and simple percussion accent, but Keating is confident enough to work her vocals along the relatively flat melody line established for a folk effect that is exactly in keeping with what a folk melody should be. In this, as in everything, Keating takes on established patterns and develops an easy sense of completeness to them. Her casual confidence then passes on to the players who build their work to pleasing layers without forcing issues.

That's what makes Vicky Pratt Keating different. She has found charm and peace in clean, simple melodies and music that doesn't try to do more than it should. She is a smart songwriter who can put some interesting twists on expectations when she puts together a song like "Ten Step Stairs," but she is just adept at making her songs from simple, familiar threads and then presenting them so that they don't need tricks to stand on their own. Go back to Nanci Griffith's best material and see how closely it clings to country and folk patterns; those are the songs that linger. Then stack a song like Keating's "The First Exchange" or "Sylvie" against something like Griffith's "Love at the Five and Dime" or "Ford Econoline" and see if Keating's don't have equal charm. Then listen to Keating's voice and the instrumentation; in the long run, Keating's Blue Apples does just fine holding up to comparisons to Nanci.