Indie chanteuse Mirah continues to lead listeners through sonic tunnels; her second album, Advisory Committee, brims with love songs for strong, nomadic hearts. Often, what starts as a folk ditty ends as a sonorous whirlwind, and the trip is almost spiritual. Mirah's guileless, Edie Brickell-ish vocal prowess is the only constant, the calm inside the storm. Advisory Committee opens with the artist's most impressive feat to date--the stirring "Cold Cold Water." Its charging momentum, classic orchestral components, and use of environmental imagery bring to mind movie scores as opposed to indie rock. When Mirah sings, "Don't take my love lightly," on the organ-fuelled "Light the Match," she ain't kidding. She and coproducer Phil Elvrum (the Microphones) employ everything from creepy carnival music and wailing violins ("Special Death") to electro cut-and-paste trickery and out-of-tune acoustic guitars ("Mt. St. Helens"). But the album's defining characteristic is how each arrangement lulls the listener while abruptly shifting gears. Advisory Committee is a rare gem--once you're exposed to its transporting powers, you won't want to leave. --Jeanne Fury
Mirah
Advisory Committee
[K; 2002]
Rating: 8.3
It's pretty sorry what passes for intimacy in recorded music these days. Anything with an acoustic guitar, too-closely-miked vocals, and lyrics about relationships can garner acclaim as "deeply personal," "moving," and "profound"-- even when it's about as intimate and deep as a fucking Hallmark card. Sorry, but a trite, unimaginative confession has nothing to do with intimacy. The most intimate depths of the human mind-- even the mind of an obnoxious midwestern singer/songwriter-- are inhabited by things far more interesting than three chords and a little reverb. The human mind is a place of imagination-- grandiose dreams, nagging fears, perplexing memories, and a batch of other insanely complicated thoughts and emotions. Expressing something so complex through music is not at all easy. Doing it in a way that's consistently interesting-- and without ever edging towards self-indulgent experimentation-- is a serious accomplishment.
Phil Elvrum, the sonic genius behind the Microphones, has made a name for himself making records that are both personal and incredibly inventive. But while Elvrum's music focuses largely on his role in nature, Mirah's second Elvrum-produced album, Advisory Committee, is a more purely introspective affair.
What sets Advisory Committee apart from these kinds of records is that, while it does address age-old album fodder like romance and heartbreak, it does so in a way that's both accessible and interesting. Many of the things said on Advisory Committee have been said before, but Mirah says them with a potent combination of sincerity, wit, and innocence.
The centerpiece of Advisory Committee is "Cold Cold Water," a piece of romantic fantasy that sounds every bit as dramatic and beautiful as the sentiments it expresses. "Cold Cold Water," with its lonely, Morricone-influenced desert twang, its passionate, icy strings and its innovative, varied percussion, is nothing short of a masterpiece, fully deserving the in-depth treatment it received on the EP that bears its name. The spooky, windy echoes, and powerful, resonating xylophone of "Special Death" is another highlight, with a guitar and melody that vaguely evoke late-90s Radiohead. "Make It Hot" sports one of the most compelling arrangements on Advisory Committee, opening with just acoustic guitar and Mirah's lovely, girlish voice singing what could be the album's second-strongest melody, behind the unfuckwithable "Cold Cold Water." The next track, "Mt. St. Helens," would feel right at home on a Microphones record, with plucked acoustic guitars, nature-centered lyrics, and Elvrum's trademark thundering percussion.
Perhaps the only major complaint that can be levied against Advisory Committee is that, when Mirah attempts quasi-operatics, it comes across as borderline ridiculous. Still, this is a vast improvement, considering that 2000's You Think It's Like This But Really It's Like This was brutally cloying throughout. Advisory Committee rarely falls into that trap. Here, Mirah is rarely interested in sounding precious, and instead adapts a more mature vocal style whose confidence reflects more Bjork than Juliana Hatfield.
Of course, "maturity"-- like "intimacy" and "introspection"-- is a word that far too often translates to "suck." In fact, all of these words have been used and abused to the point where they don't mean much of anything anymore. And that's what's so great about Advisory Committee-- when you strip down these adjectives to their purest meaning, they actually do a pretty damned good job of describing the music. Imagine that!
-Matt LeMay, April 9th, 2002
Review by Heather Phares
Mirah's first album, You Think It's Like This But It's Really Like This, was a sweet, sensitive collection of folky indie pop, but her follow-up, Advisory Committee, is such a stunning leap forward that it feels more like a real introduction than her debut did. The album retains some of the homespun lo-fi charm of You Think It's Like This..., but Advisory Committee is also dramatic, even theatrical, as on the stunning first track, "Cold Cold Water." A sweeping spaghetti Western of a song, its swelling strings, galloping percussion, and haunting vocals portray being in love as a life-or-death situation. Only Bjork does this type of drama as well, and a large part of the song's success is due to Phil Elvrum's production. Though he and Mirah have collaborated before on Elvrum's Microphones albums, on Advisory Committee their styles complement each other perfectly: His unique, often trippy production techniques give her gorgeous, guileless voice and imaginative songwriting equally creative settings. While "Cold Cold Water" is the album's obvious standout, Advisory Committee features more than a handful of remarkable songs, not the least of which is the epic title track, a virtual rock opera that reclaims the steel drums as a rock instrument. "Mt. St. Helens," which likens the destructive force of a breakup to the famous volcano, begins as a simple folk song before building to a violently emotional climax; "The Garden" uses just an ominous bassline, bludgeoning percussion, and Mirah's commanding vocals to fuse anger, sadness, and love into one raw, simple yet complex emotion. Even Advisory Committee's less ambitious moments are surprising, whether it's the unabashedly sexy gypsy love song "Light the Match" or the seemingly lighthearted slice of Olympia lo-fi new wave, "Recommendation." Most impressively, the many stylistic shifts, both from song to song and within each song, never sound forced; they're more like forces of nature coursing through the album. Indeed, Mirah's songs deal with elemental themes -- love, sex, heat, cold, fire, and water -- in highly artistic and occasionally spiritual terms that are poetic but never pretentious. A tour de force, Advisory Committee packs several albums' worth of emotion, beauty, and creativity into a concise, brilliant package.
http://www.cse.sc.edu/~wrightjb/mirah/mirahome.html
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