Mirah launched her career at the end of the 1990s in Olympia, Washington, and while she no longer lives there, the city's twin legacies of riot grrl and twee pop still faintly cling to her sound. Her downy voice is equally appealing whether set in growly rock music or glitteringly ornate folk, the poles that her new album Changing Light often switches between. But more than Bikini Kill or Beat Happening, she recalls a certain Pacific Northwest band that she came up alongside. Specifically, Mirah's lyric writing resembles the Decemberists' Colin Meloy if he sang from his diaphragm instead of his nose, and likewise she's too poised for the chancy idioms of punk and twee. Instead, she makes her albums into their own magical islands where nothing too chaotic gets in—or out.
It's been five years since Mirah's last LP, the gentle and enveloping (a)spera, where the music evoked seashell fragments glinting in a shallow tide. Changing Light reflects a marked sonic shift from polish to grit. "I will go to the desert," Mirah sings on opening track "Goat Shepherd", and the arid invocation lingers even through the verdant ballads. In theme and sound, this is a relatively stripped down music of desperation and exile. Gouged with desert rock tropes, the album inverts (a)spera’s blue-hued fluidity, built instead on a rugged bedrock of shadowy black and scorched orange timbres. Distorted electric guitars snarl and bite, drums slap and rattle in your chest, basses plunge like canyons. Even as the brass on "No Direction Home" glowers like Mahler, a rattlesnake shaker sneaks the desert in. Mirah unfolds a characteristically lovely but slow-stepping vocal melody, a mannered pace that makes her songs sound more alike than they are until you spend considerable time with them.
Mingled with these tougher, grainier sounds, Changing Light has plenty of torchy art music based on gossamer acoustic strains, such as the folky "Fleet Foot Ghost". There are shades of '80s pop ballads on "Turned the Heat Off", the first Mirah song to even remotely bring Belinda Carlisle to mind, and slinky album highlight "Oxen Hope", where a light slick of vocoder seems to unfasten some restraint in the singer, who turns in an unusually limber performance. But the synth-tom rolls buried deep in the mix, like someone falling down a staircase inside herself, remind us that a quiet catastrophe is underway.
Uprooting herself after a breakup, Mirah wrote these songs while living an itinerant existence over the last few years. Still, she picked up collaborators as she ran—Deerhoof drummer Greg Saunier, a well-matched Mary Timony, Mount Moriah's Heather McEntire, and Emily Wells. The music is topped with generally flattering arrangements by Seattle composer Jherek Bischoff, whose strings slice so high and thin they're like cuts you barely feel until the blood starts flowing.
Mirah's sister Emily Zeitlyn co-wrote "LC", an aptly dusky and prayerful homage, complete with second-person confessional tone, to the breakup survival kit that Leonard Cohen's music provides. But the topic has begun to wear a bit thin, because as Mirah sings on "No Direction Home", "This is a sorrow everyone knows." You can only hear about other people's breakups for so long before sympathy turns into a desire to talk about something else, especially when the resulting pain is described in such wrought, high, distancing language.
Mirah's slightly clinical approach to songwriting makes this ostensibly personal album revealing only in comparison to her often guarded prior ones. For all its emotional charge, Changing Light barely feels more intimate than Share This Place, her multimedia concept album inspired by a French entomologist—in fact, she writes more comfortably and warmly about the insect kingdom than the human one. Here, she continues to seem a little beyond our reach, hidden behind the hedgerows of manicured arrangements and an imperturbable singing style. Even in the wide-open conceptual deserts with collaborators in tow, Mirah's music is somehow still an island: enticing, but always receding as we approach.
