Mirah Yom Tov Zeitlyn's recently broken her artistic banks, flooding her discographical
landscape with assorted recordings — an in-a-mountain-cabin collaboration
with Ginger Brooks Takahashi called Music From the Black Mountain
Music Project, a covers-collection collaboration with the Black Cat
Orchestra called To All We Stretch the Open Arm — that fans
have gladly gleaned, as means for tiding over time until her Advisory
Committee follow-up sailed on to the scene. Such a follow-up floats
in in the form of C'mon Miracle, the latest and (yes!) greatest
work from a songsmith whose résumé may remain underground
and unknown for not too much longer. Google may ask "Did you mean: Mariah" when
you type in her name, but Mirah is a diva only in the "great woman singer" (and
not the prima donna) sense; the sweetly-singing K Records heroine has
the sort of voice that communicates a wealth of emotion through a reduction
in volume and voracity; her singing tends towards whispery intimacy where
it has the chance. That she finds subject matter to match that delivery
is what makes Mirah's music profound; and, even as C'mon Miracle shows
her to be more worldly — "The Dogs in Buenos Aires" personalizing
the Spanish frolickings of "To All We Stretch the Open Arm," and, more
notably, "Jerusalem" offering a savage critique of the Israeli nation
that'd likely get dubbed as "anti-Semitic" if it wasn't authored by a
Jew — it's still the openly-personal moments that mark Mirah's art
as great. This disc's literal and aesthetic centerpiece is “We're Both
So Sorry," which begins with her quiet voice left largely naked, dressed
only in insufficient thrums of autoharp, the auspicious opening leaving
Mirah standing exposed, singing: "I know you didn't mean it, and you're
sorry that I left/ I'll go right on pretending I've got nothing to regret/
Except all of the times we wasted giving only second best/ You always
seemed to lose the spark when I was only half-undressed." From there,
her voice gently rises in tenor, whilst held trumpet notes and gentle
flecks of guitar begin to gather before the song then shifts into a middle
section of guitar-playing, smothered bass drum, and whispery, slightly-out-of-time
multi-tracked vocals, before shifting, again, towards a conclusion where
Mirah's voice strains to bridge a performative gap between whispering
and hitting high notes, such contrasting crackingly with a bustling rhythm
fashioned from crackling contact-mic feedback and guitar-led static.
It's no surprise that such idiosyncratic production work comes from Microphones/Mt.Eerie
maestro Phil Elvrum, the longtime friend/collaborateur whose role in
Mirah's records has, previously, seemed to be a little overvalued. Perhaps
this is why Mirah went wandering, not just to Argentina and to North
Carolina, but in her discography, off to find herself by venturing far
from herself. Having spread her bloody wings, she's returned to the K
Recs nest, and her songbird's voice has never sounded more beautiful
than it does here.
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