THAO & MIRAH - Thao & Mirah

Singer-songwriter Mirah, certainly no stranger to collaborations and helping hands, decided for 2011 to team up for a duet with another singer-songwriter, Thao Nguyen, the Californian vocalist recently acclaimed alongside the larger ensemble Get Down Stay Down.

The result, "Thao & Mirah", boasts a rather brilliant first half: from the hip-hop electro-ethnic sound of "Eleven", thick with little percussion, to the dub-soul of "Rubies And Rocks", driven by a strong rhythmic pulse and unsettling Puerto Rican horns (complete with a collective improvisation at the close), to the serenade worthy of Vashti Bunyan in "Little Cup", its rhythm built from breath, mouth, string-breaths and the trot of a bass drum, through to the uptempo folkish "Folks", with its Spanish-tinged trumpets and marching drums, edging close to the pseudo-symphonic experiments of Sufjan Stevens

In the second half they take it all back, abandoning the exploration and settling into solitary songs that sound almost like personal demos ("Spaced Out Orbit", "Likeable Man", "Squareneck").

The two of them (or the three, since the first half is whipped into shape by the creative orchestrations of Merrill Garbus, aka Tune-Yards) put together a work that's only half successful. Not just in quality, but in quantity too; the second half barely exists. As for the first, it depends on your point of view: for the artists, it's a handful of songs that bring new paradigms to both their careers. For the listener, they're two trajectories that intertwine and produce results that are almost spectacular.

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02/05/2011