Mia Doi Todd
Zeroone
[City Zen; 2001]
Rating: 7.1
After landing on a handful of critics' year-end top ten lists with her 1997 debut,
Come Out of Your Mine, and with just as many midsize record labels vying
for her signature, Los Angeles-based singer/songwriter Mia Doi Todd went and did
a very brave thing-- some may call it very stupid. She decided to turn down all
offers, formed her own label, and self-released her follow-up album.
That album, Zeroone, the first release on City Zen Records, was released
to significantly less fanfare than it would have received if it came out on, say,
Sub Pop, which is too bad because it's at least as good as her debut, although
not much of a progression. Harrowing, introspective, bare-bones voice and guitar,
with emphasis on complex lyrical interplay, Zeroone is brimming with
verbal puns and extended metaphors, all delivered with a voice that will stop
you cold and send you running to either the repeat or stop button, depending
what you look for in a vocalist.
Imagine Tim Buckley meets Nico and you'll be in the ballpark of her sultry
croons. Operatic, wavering, and ethereal, but also sullen and detached,
Todd's voice is the first thing anyone approaching her music will notice. The
second thing-- and the second potential obstacle-- is her lyrics. Yes, they're
replete with literary complexity, but they're also sometimes full of literary
preciousness. Some of her songs will surely come off as just a bit too cute,
even pretentious, to some listeners-- even listeners like me who happen to like
many of her songs.
"Digital" is, unfortunately, Zeroone's lead-off track, and a good example
of her over-wrought, over-refined, overly grad-school songcrafting. Hovering
above her typical but adequate guitar accompaniment, Todd repeats such wordy
insights as "digital, binary system, ones and zeros, dark versus light, yin and
yang," and so on and so on and so on. It just tries too hard to make some kind
of, like, deep observation about life, man. I don't buy it. It sounds like the
work of someone who just finished reading her first book on, say, entropic
heat-death-- or maybe her first Thomas Pynchon novel-- and was inspired too try
her hand at this whole po-mo gig. And don't even get me started on "Ziggurat."
Its opening verse speaks for itself: "Ziggurats are built only to crumble/ We
approach the gods then prepare to tumble down." Now I'll tolerate this kind of
heavy-handed grandiosity in my heavy metal, or even in my hip-hop, but I'll be
damned if I'm going to put up with it in acoustic balladry.
But all is forgiven when a song like "Can I?" rolls around. Sounding much like
something off Buckley's Lorca or Starsailor albums, to call it
haunting would be an understatement. And simply quoting a line or two wouldn't
even come close to conveying its power and mystery-- most of that comes from her
delivery-- but suffice it to say she uses a refrain ("Can I?/ I think I can/ I
can I think/ Think I can") to weave a elaborate nexus connecting the various
meanings within the song to stunning effect. Although the track is nearly ten
minutes long and constructed simply from voice and guitar, I can't remember ever
losing interest for a moment, even after multiple times through.
"Can I?" alone is worth the price of the album. It makes me willing to trudge
through the wordy muck constituting some of her other songs, and willing to test
her future releases, in hope of finding something else so powerful. But if you
aren't into dropping $13 for ten minutes of greatness, you can check her out on
any number of fully Pitchfork-approved releases, like Dntel's Life is
Full of Possibilities and Dublab's Freeways compilation.
-Jason Nickey, November 12th, 2001