Apart

by

Mira

Edit

The much anticipated second album from Mira.One wouldn't expect them to top their debut,but well...they do.To an extent it's hard to fully grasp really. More varied than their debut,yes...in this case NOT a bad thing at all,although I loved their first album over anything when it got released.Starting off with the almost poppy "Space",a beautiful unusually upbeat song for Mira,is the perfect starter and still nothing compared to what's to come.Which is "Going Nowhere","In Theory","Green","Open In Silence" (which is THE Mira song),"Miss" and "Hollow"...all which is nothing but absolutely brilliant and (believe it or not) equally great,and in some cases actually better than whatever you could find on their debut.Cayman included.

The voice...the guitars...the atmosphere...it's breathtaking. Enjoy "Apart"...the best of 2001 for sure.

Mira have got a pretty good thing going, really; the singer's voice is exquisitely lovely, the musicianship is good, and the songwriting is complex and never gets repetitive. The problem is that they only know how to write one type of song (at least as far as this album's evidence). All the songs here are about 6 minutes long, in the keys of E minor or A minor (at least mainly, as far as I can tell), and are well put-together but seem a bit too 'riffy' somehow. When everything goes right, the tendrils of a placid guitar arpeggio lift you up gently while the singer's (can't recall her name at the moment) voice lilts and spirals upwards in sweet melodious ease, but then they seem to throw in kind of arbitrary changes in the songs just in an attempt to keep things moving. Mira has some pretty good material (their cover of MBV's "When You Sleep" is AMAZING), but on this one they just seem a bit too content to stick with a formula. With one song after another with the exact same mood as the last ("oh I'm so alone, someone come talk to me"), it gets somewhat tiresome and not a little depressing, like an intangible weight. Besides "Space" and "In Theory", which I heard previously on a free Projekt sampler and are the best renditions of the style they unfortunately overdo, only "Green" and "Hollow" really seem to stand out to me, and at least "Plastique" sounds a *little* different with its nice classical guitar work.