Mirah and Thao should always record together. I don’t know Thao’s solo work, but I know Mirah’s.  I’ve always thought that I should be a bigger fan of hers than I am, but I’m enough of a fan that when I saw that she would be going on tour with a woman named Thao, I checked out some of their music, streaming for free on NPR. 

The collaboration, which takes Mirah’s kid-like voice and interesting lyrics and adds yells, handclaps, vocal percussion and tribal, harmonic voices,  is so much better than Mirah alone.  The album is like a couple of kids playing pretend in the forest—you’re running and shouting and then you’re travelling to outerspace and then you’re playing house with your best friend.  And then you get some metal garbage cans and bang them together. It’s awesome and organic and free.  Whimsy is these friends' (and possibly girlfriends, which would be too adorable if they were singing some of the love songs on the album to each other) best quality.

Mirah and Thao (the lead singer of the Thao with Get Down Stay Down) were put together for a tour last year because somebody thought their music worked well together.  After the tour, the San Francisco-based musicians recorded the album in about two weeks and released it through the well-respected label, Kill Rock Records.

The album doesn’t sound like such a quick collaboration, however, probably because the two had time to polish their music while on tour.  The album is adeptly layered and is ripe with unusual and unusual percussion (like hand claps, foot stomps and tambourine) which give it a likeable down-to-earth homemade quality, on top of live horn and string accompaniments. It’s like Mirah and Thao were hanging out with a string quartet and a couple of trumpet players in some fancy concert hall and they all started a hoe down without putting their instruments down. 

The album is obviously influenced by the solo music of each of the musicians.  This could make the final product seem disjointed—that’s a Thao song! That’s a Mirah songs!—like on other duo’s albums, on which it's obvious which singer penned each song. Although it is decipherable who authored each song, most obviously by who sings lead vocals, there’s enough consistency throughbout the album—provided primarily by synthesizers, repeated whispered vocals, harmonizing on the chours, and, again, the consistent percussive elements—that it sounds like a single story with chapters, rather than a bunch of short stories in a haphazardly pieced together book. 

The collaboration seems to give Mirah more freedom and ease in experimentation. The ladies' co-producer, Merill Garbus, apparently is really into experimenting and helped write some of the tracks.  On her solo stuff, Mirah always seems to be posing in some strange costume or holding something unusual on her album cover.  Not that she has to be weird, but it’s like she really wants to be.  Her music is nice and her voice is light and sweet, but the music she makes doesn’t fit with the image she seems to try to create.  The music on this album fits it.  It’s wild and carefree, but not intimidating; it’s accessible in the way that experimental music can’t always be—it’ll make you hum it and stomp your feet along. This is the kind of music Mirah should have been making all along.

Sources:

http://www.earmilk.com/2011/04/29/mirah-thao-thao-mirah-album-review/