After landing on a handful of critics' year-end top ten lists with her 1997 debut, Come Out of Your Mine, and with just as many midsize record labels vying for her signature, Los Angeles-based singer/songwriter Mia Doi Todd went and did a very brave thing-- some may call it very stupid. She decided to turn down all offers, formed her own label, and self-released her follow-up album.
That album, Zeroone, the first release on City Zen Records, was released to significantly less fanfare than it would have received if it came out on, say, Sub Pop, which is too bad because it's at least as good as her debut, although not much of a progression. Harrowing, introspective, bare-bones voice and guitar, with emphasis on complex lyrical interplay, Zeroone is brimming with verbal puns and extended metaphors, all delivered with a voice that will stop you cold and send you running to either the repeat or stop button, depending what you look for in a vocalist.
Imagine Tim Buckley meets Nico and you'll be in the ballpark of her sultry croons. Operatic, wavering, and ethereal, but also sullen and detached, Todd's voice is the first thing anyone approaching her music will notice. The second thing-- and the second potential obstacle-- is her lyrics. Yes, they're replete with literary complexity, but they're also sometimes full of literary preciousness. Some of her songs will surely come off as just a bit too cute, even pretentious, to some listeners-- even listeners like me who happen to like many of her songs.
"Digital" is, unfortunately, Zeroone's lead-off track, and a good example of her over-wrought, over-refined, overly grad-school songcrafting. Hovering above her typical but adequate guitar accompaniment, Todd repeats such wordy insights as "digital, binary system, ones and zeros, dark versus light, yin and yang," and so on and so on and so on. It just tries too hard to make some kind of, like, deep observation about life, man. I don't buy it. It sounds like the work of someone who just finished reading her first book on, say, entropic heat-death-- or maybe her first Thomas Pynchon novel-- and was inspired too try her hand at this whole po-mo gig. And don't even get me started on "Ziggurat." Its opening verse speaks for itself: "Ziggurats are built only to crumble/ We approach the gods then prepare to tumble down." Now I'll tolerate this kind of heavy-handed grandiosity in my heavy metal, or even in my hip-hop, but I'll be damned if I'm going to put up with it in acoustic balladry.
But all is forgiven when a song like "Can I?" rolls around. Sounding much like something off Buckley's Lorca or Starsailor albums, to call it haunting would be an understatement. And simply quoting a line or two wouldn't even come close to conveying its power and mystery-- most of that comes from her delivery-- but suffice it to say she uses a refrain ("Can I?/ I think I can/ I can I think/ Think I can") to weave a elaborate nexus connecting the various meanings within the song to stunning effect. Although the track is nearly ten minutes long and constructed simply from voice and guitar, I can't remember ever losing interest for a moment, even after multiple times through.
"Can I?" alone is worth the price of the album. It makes me willing to trudge through the wordy muck constituting some of her other songs, and willing to test her future releases, in hope of finding something else so powerful. But if you aren't into dropping $13 for ten minutes of greatness, you can check her out on any number of fully Pitchfork-approved releases, like Dntel's Life is Full of Possibilities and Dublab's Freeways compilation.
