The general consensus on Mirah Yom Tov Zeitlyn seems to be that one day she will make a great album. We know she has it in her, because she's let her cards show once-- with "Cold Cold Water", an unhinged, vertiginous, epic single that easily one-upped The Flaming Lips in orchestral bombast and yet remained intimate as a whisper. That song was a revelation; I feel reasonably safe claiming that it sounded like nothing anyone had recorded before, save Ennio Morricone as the obvious influence. Shockingly, Mirah and her producer-cum-Microphones-bandmate Phil Elvrum blew right past their own brilliance-- the rest of that album (2002's Advisory Committee) ping-ponged listlessly from coffeehouse folk to rickety lo-fi electro and back.
So, does this new offering from Mirah deliver on that semi-accidental promise? As you can probably glean from its somewhat unwieldy billing and workmanlike title, it's not meant to. It's a 28-minute sound collage that nestles five or six songs among freeform instrumentals, unprocessed ideas and found sounds. Songs from the Black Mountain comes weighted with tons of extraneous circumstance-- Mirah recorded it with her friend Ginger Brooks Takahashi during a 30-day stay in a mountain town, presumably on portable equipment; its proceeds go to charities like the Rock'n'Roll Camp for Girls. In short, this record all but begs not to be judged as a proper album.
I don't know what's at the root of this need to bury songs in ephemera, but it's beginning to look a lot like fear of responsibility. I hated wading through the muck of The Microphones' Song Islands for morsels of Elvrum's wan songwriting; solo Mirah at her best is so much better than Elvrum that it makes her worst that much more frustrating. To demonstrate what I mean, let's just get it over with and divide the album in two segments which, for easier reference, we'll call "songs" and "other shit."
"The Knife Thrower": a gently perverse torch ballad reminiscent of Advisory Committee's "The Garden" and "Light the Match", wonderfully packed with such antique locutions as "lark" and "asunder."
"Life You Love": a surprisingly straight-faced bluegrass number, with stuttering banjo on a bed of languid lap steel, and both women on vocals.
"Pure": a minimal yet powerful melody built around one heartbreaking chord change, a whispery incantation of "give in" and precisely applied touches of ambiance both natural and industrial. The album's tentpole.
"Rock of Ages": sung a capella, aside from a couple of fleeting piano chords, with the friends' voices double- and triple-tracked into a complicated choral arrangement.
"Oh! September": pure fun, with doo-wop vocals that actually go "doo-wop," and an honest-to-goodness surf guitar. Somewhat reminiscent of her recent brilliant Ragazza Pop compilation contribution, "Don't". A special bonus for rhyming "baby" with "ukulele."
I believe it goes without saying that, for Mirah Yom Tov Zeitlyn, coming up with that great album will be a matter of subtraction, not addition.
