Mirah — Advisory Committee

I want to meet that girl. Anybody who can coax an album like that out of the silent air of a studio must be interesting enough to hook up with (the fact that I think she’s cute looking and has a sexy voice really has nothing to do with it). In the tradition of everything that I’ve heard that Phil Elvrum (from The Microphones; has also worked with Little Wing) has touched, the production is great in a homemade, lo-fi kind of way and it constantly changes from one track to the other to complement and augment the song.

I’m warning you, this album has some intense moments (not in the melodramatic way that pop culture has accustomed us to): It’s filled with a wide range of very pure emotions. Song-driven folky indie-pop is what I’d call it, but how it really sound could be hard to imagine for someone who has never heard Mirah (or The Microphones and Little Wing for that matter) because the instrumentation is non-linear in a way that I haven’t encountered often outside the prog-rock world – each song has ever-morphing aesthetics relatively to the rest of the album but also compared to the rest of the song itself. Don’t be mistaken, the production is not what carries the album; All those songs could be played with bare-bones arrangements (ie. Acoustic guitar) and still be great. The strings, steel drums, accordions, electronics and tons of different ways of recording the drums and guitars only enhance the solid song-writing that deals with, as Heather Phares so succinctly put it, “elemental themes -- love, sex, heat, cold, fire, and water”.

Right now I’m sitting in front of my keyboard, listening to the album, looking at the track list and wondering what are the negative things to say about Advisory Committee… Nothing comes to mind. This album is, in my opinion, a very enjoyable piece of music without any pretension, a complete artistic success. Period.