It's easy to understand why a major label like Columbia would sign Mia Doi Todd. On the strength of three independently released albums, she has developed a strong cult following, and a number of influential critics have warmed up to her. Plus, she has some pretty cool admirers (like Lou Barlow, for one) and has made guest appearances for such hipsters as Dntel and Beachwood Sparks. Her songs, of course, aren't your standard major label fare: some of them have fairly complicated (if not overly pretentious) lyrical conceits. But her voice is such a distinctive instrument, able to both soar dramatically and evoke intimacy, that most listeners probably won't even think twice about the words she sings.
It's also makes sense that Columbia would hire a guy like Mitchell Froom to produce Todd. With an extensive resume that includes Richard Thompson, David Byrne, and Elvis Costello, he's the majors' producer-of-choice when they need a singer/songwriter type polished up a bit for mass consumption-- though he has a tendency to overdo it sometimes (a few Richard Thompson albums spring to mind). Seeing the Columbia label on the spine of The Golden State, Mia Doi Todd's major label debut, you can almost hear the board meeting that must've taken place to discuss her Beth Orton/Aimee Mann-like crossover potential. And, that too makes sense and is easily imagined.
Sadly (for me, at least), it also makes sense why they'd choose to re-record Todd's older material for her major label debut. There are a lot of good songs on those albums, so it's hard to go too terribly wrong. But to someone who's been buying her albums all along, it sure seems like a cop out. I, for one, would have liked to have seen more new material, especially in light of her recent collaborations with the above-mentioned artists. Instead, The Golden State offers updated versions of songs from all three of her previous albums.
The danger with this approach, of course, is screwing up the old versions with heavy-handed production or uncomplimentary instrumentation. By and large though, Todd and Froom have avoided this. The ten-song album is top-heavy with the more spiffed-up songs, as you might expect, and the more bare-bone tracks comprise the second half. "88 Ways" and "Digital", for example, open the album in bad fashion. And though they do happen to be the most embellished songs here, it's not overproduction that kills them; they're just bad songs. Filled with postmodern catchwords like "entropy" and "binary", the self-serious and pseudo-intellectual lyrics prepare these tracks for certain inclusion on the soundtrack to the next Keanu Reeves cyberflick.
"Independence Day", however, turns it around with a rendition subtly shifted from the original, with distant keys underscoring the song's already sinister tension. Another highlight is "Autumn", which first appeared on Todd's debut album, The Ewe and the Eye. Here it's given a more upbeat and carefree reading befitting its theme of breaking free from a failing relationship. Stripping the accompaniment down to just voice and guitar on a song about escaping into fantasy in the face of sexual guilt, "Poppy Fields" brings Todd back to the kind of material on which she built her reputation: her finger-picked guitar speeds faster and faster toward the end of the song, and she stumbles as she repeats, "another world, another world"-- it's both disorientating and claustrophobic.
It's probably a smart move for Columbia to release a reconfigured sampler of her early songs to catch people up on her talent. Yet, as an ardent fan, it's hard for me not to feel a little let down. When I got my hands on The Golden State, I was genuinely excited to see how Todd had developed as a songwriter since her last album. Sadly, she hasn't developed at all. In fact, come to think of it, she hasn't really developed that much since her debut. All her albums so far, despite their merits, have been more or less interchangeable, both in mood and maturity. Hopefully, with this "best of" behind her, she will be unburdened of her past and free to grow into the songwriter she's shown signs of becoming.
