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(Clicka qua per la versione Italiana)
Japanese-born singer-songwriter Mitski Miyawaki debuted with collections of
mostly piano-driven orchestral songs while she was still a student in upstate New York.
The eight-song mini-album Lush (2012) harked back to the sophisticated intellectual
crooners of previous decades (the likes of
Joni Mitchell and
Kate Bush)
with the jazzy Liquid Smooth,
the bluesy Bag of Bones,
the austere piano lied of Wife,
the hypnotic psychoanalysis of Pearl Diver.
Instead, the
Randy Newman-esque vaudeville of Real Men
and the hard-rocking and dissonant Brand New City show greater ambitions.
The stylistic palette of
Retired from Sad - New Career in Business (2013),
another concise collection (eleven songs in less than 30 minutes).
is quite broad, ranging from
Goodbye My Danish Sweetheart, which recalls
Art Bears-esque prog-rock of the 1970s,
to Strawberry Blond, a
jovial round dance reminiscent of the folk revival of the 1960s.
The sinister chamber lied Square represents a balance of sorts between
the two, and Shame shows the full potential of the idea: a
post-Bjork-ian ode within
a chamber accompaniment that is cinematic and almost dissonant.
Piano elegies such as I Want You
and Because Dreaming Costs Money My Dear (influenced by Pachelbel's and Bach's music)
exude a quiet but profound sadness, although
Class of 2013 soars to an almost defiant tone.
After graduation Mitski turned to guitar-driven rock on
Bury Me at Makeout Creek (Dead Oceans, 2014), an album where
she seemed to rediscover the rocking female singer-songwriters of the 1990s,
such as
Sheryl Crow,
Liz Phair,
and
Juliana Hatfield.
Her theme of "death of innocence" is now more extroverted:
the country lament Texas Reznikoff suddenly erupts into a maniac pounding singalong,
Drunk Walk Home is almost punk-rock,
and the catchy Townie is a full-fledged burning saloon boogie.
Her vulnerability is turning violent.
On the other hand, the heartbreak anthem First Love/ Late Spring is a hybrid of the gentle folk-rock
and the romantic French ye-ye girls
of the 1960s, and Francis Forever is a lullaby very much in the vein
of the latter.
She couples that melancholy naive tone with Nirvana-esque guitar in Francis Forever (another melodic peak),
and I Don't Smoke weds the distorted guitar of doom-metal with the austere singing of a Renaissance madrigal.
The lyrical peaks are still bare:
Carry Me Out, a crescendo from barely whispered to choral singalong,
and Last Words of a Shooting Star for only acoustic guitar.
Producer and multi-instrumentalist Patrick Hyland twisted her songs on
Puberty 2 (Dead Oceans, 2016), starting with the
industrial beats and saxophones of Happy
and with the glitchy slow dance of Thursday Girl.
Her "rock" alter-ego shines in more aggressive tunes:
Your Best American Girl, her breakout song, bridges slocore and shoegazing,
My Body's Made of Crushed Little Stars is a
chaotically noisy punk-ish street rant,
worthy of the great mad David Peel,
and
A Loving Feeling boasts the catchy refrains and rowdy garage-rock of Phil Spector's girl-groups.
Halfway towards that goal,
she crafts an elegant orchestral ballad in
Fireworks, but, more importantly,
she then adds a hypnotic psychedelic feeling to the format
with I Bet on Losing Dogs,
and wraps it in atmospheric organ phrases in Crack Baby.
Her anxiety and depression mainly permeates
Once More to See You, inspired by the dreamy lullabies of thr
teen idols of the 1960s, and especially the simple folk elegy
A Burning Hill
("I am a forest fire/
And I am the fire and I am the forest/
And I am a witness watching it/
I stand in a valley watching it/
And you are not there at all").
Patrick Hyland exaggerated a bit on the clumsily arranged
Be the Cowboy (Dead Oceans, 2018), an album that packs
14 songs in 32 minutes. The effect is to sometimes
trivialize loneliness and heartbreak, for example in the
bombastic Geyser, in the
dance-pop of Why Didn't You Stop Me,
in the sprightly singalong Washing Machine Heart (a strong beat coupled with vintage synth),
in the even more danceable single Nobody (feverish funky guitar and steady disco beat),
and
in the soaring operatic A Pearl, perhaps the most theatrical moment.
On the other hand, the more introverted tunes, starting with the
emotional orchestral pop of Pink in the Night and the
country lament Lonesome Love, sound less charming than their predecessors.
The bugglegum pop of Me and My Husband,
the folk carillon of Old Friend and
the ethereal Blue Light try a bit too hard to make her unhappiness
sound entertaining.
Two Slow Dancers returns to the chamber pop of her first two albums,
A Horse Named Cold Air is a solemn piano elegy worthy of her first album,
(Copyright © 2019 Piero Scaruffi | Terms of use )
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