9 Oct 2021

The Sampler - Mia Doi Todd, Vera Ellen, Nite Jewel

From The Sampler, 1:30 pm on 9 October 2021

Tony Stamp merges his bubble with the expansive new album from Japanese-American folk singer Mia Doi Todd, Wellington-via-Los Angeles musician Vera Ellen's Flying Nun debut, and the minimal synth experiments of Ramona Gonzales, AKA Nite Jewel.

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Music Life by Mia Doi Todd

Mia Doi Todd

Mia Doi Todd Photo: supplied

As someone who loves to travel, and who was lucky enough to do some prior to everything changing a few years ago, I found this album slightly comforting. It almost feels like a mini-world tour, checking in on different musical flavours as it goes.

Japanese-American folk musician Mia Doi Todd has been releasing albums since 1997, the first handful of which featured just the sound of her voice and acoustic guitar. That sound has clearly expanded, and maybe I’m overstating the case when I say the album travels from country to country, but Doi Todd is clearly luxuriating in her collaborators' contributions, and those push the songs in different directions.

Jeff Parker from the band Tortoise shows up on the first track ‘Music Life’ - which is also the name of the album. Doi Todd sets up the song’s framework then settles into it - that track is over six minutes, and a lot of these tunes approach ten. 

It outlines her life as a musician. She’s forty six and recently had a child, and there’s the feeling of taking stock of her career up to this point. She sings about finding religion in your instrument, and having friends who are dotted around the country, some of them maybe too into their whisky and hallucinogens.  

‘Little Bird’ alludes to childhood trauma, but musically it’s extremely breezy, like a stroll across a Brazilian beach. The song offers advice to a young person stuck in Los Angeles - leave. Tellingly, a list of international cities runs through the song - London, Paris, Mexico City and around twenty more suggested as preferable to LA.

Doi Todd’s folk roots are evident in the way she carefully enunciates each word, in her somewhat prim and proper voice. It’s bursting with sincerity though, and what impresses me about this collection is the way each song takes a different approach, but all clearly come from her.

On 'Mohinder and the Maharani' that involves Indian history, and bringing in appropriate instruments like the khamak and ektara, which you can hear in its dramatic intro.

Mia Doi Todd’s last two albums were collections of covers, and there’s one here too - a version of ‘If I Don’t Have You’ by Gregory Isaacs. She almost doubles the tempo, but hones in on the song’s melancholy core, and the result is achingly lovely.

This is an album where each song has its own unique story, or even part of the world - one is named after a valley on a Hawaiian island, another is a love song from the perspective of a water spirit in the Yoruba religion. 

It’s an album where each collaborator plays a valuable part - one of those is Money Mark, who played keys in the Beastie Boys for several albums. Folk roots blend into jazz riffs, everything is unhurried and underpinned by groove, and at the centre of it all is the zen presence of Mia Dio Todd, reflecting on motherhood, music, and the entire planet.

It's Your Birthday by Vera Ellen

Vera Ellen

Vera Ellen Photo: supplied

When the Los Angeles band Girl Friday released their debut album Androgynous Mary, the PR emphasised their solidarity. It said the band ‘negotiate the stress and alienation that comes with being sidelined from normative society’, and that ‘the world is a hellscape, but the four of them are in it together.’

That album gained quite a bit of critical buzz, and as it turned out, band member Vera Ellen, who plays guitar and sings, is from New Zealand. She’s just released a new solo album, appropriately enough on Flying Nun Records. 

Flying Nun founder Roger Shepherd has called it his favourite of the year, and it’s easy to see why. There’s a wonderfully shambolic feel to this album, an intentional sloppiness that feels like the most pleasant aspects of a hangover.

The songwriting is rock solid, generally falling into a sort of indie power pop zone. But effort has been made to keep it all casual. When a sly guitar line creeps into the mix, it feels downright cheeky. And Ellen’s voice often sounds like she’s winking, even when seemingly dealing with serious topics like gender dysphoria on ‘I Want 2 B Boy’. 

She's a really good singer, almost despite herself - going out of her way to flatten notes she could hold, and really leaning into enunciating her New Zealand accent. On ‘Heart in Reaction’ she speak-sings her way through the verse, but her voice is so pure when she hits the upper register in the pre-chorus. 

Speaking about Girl Friday, and the way their music tries to balance light and shade, Ellen described it as "really dark, heavy things mashed up with quite beautiful things, whether that be a distorted guitar line and a sentimental vocal or vice versa". That approach is definitely still at play here, but the overwhelming feel of the album is positivity. The word ‘joy’ comes up multiple times. 

She recorded the album in NZ during two trips home to Wellington, and says the songs cover her early twenties (she’s now twenty five). Songs were written while broke in Hollywood and homesick, others while elated in the throes of love. 

One specific reference I caught in the song ‘Yuppie Farm’ deals with her time as a barista in LA. She sings about packing her bags and giving up her dreams, presumably an allusion to coming back to NZ.

On 'Crack the Whip' the line ‘We love each other through a picture’ made me think about long distance communication over video call, something we’ve all gotten used to recently.

Girl Friday aren’t an angry band per se, and many of the societal problems they address come up here too, but comparatively, Vera Ellen sounds like a weight has lifted from her shoulders. Even calling the album It’s Your Birthday speaks to its often celebratory feel. 

Much as I like her Los Angeles band, I hope she comes home to make more solo albums in future.

No Sun by Nite Jewel

Nite Jewel

Nite Jewel Photo: supplied

A recent entry into the breakup canon came out recently from Los Angeles musician Nite Jewel, and it’s one that demands attention - in the story behind it, as well as the way the album itself looks to bust apart several genres, and come up with something new.

Ramona Gonzeles started making albums in 2008, specialising in a unique kind of lo-fi RnB, which in its infancy was described as ‘chillwave’.

On her new album No Sun she’s adjusted her approach in some pretty radical ways, so while you can still hear the influence of her early heroes Janet Jackson and Mariah Carey, everything aside from her voice has been stripped back to its component parts. 

During the writing of the album Gonzales’ twelve year marriage ended, and her emotional state made its way into the album’s structure in some pretty fundamental ways. When you use a piece of music software, it will have an internal metronome, and a grid that you can snap each note to - this is how basically everyone works now, even some bands. Gonzales opted not to, instead using a Moog Mother 32 synth to provide a pulsing rhythm that she then had to keep time with.

She wrote by improvising over it, and because of this approach wound up with things like pauses - there because she was thinking what to do next -  which she decided to keep. These occasional moments of silence reflect the album’s theme of loss and loneliness.

The pulse that runs through the album can also feel like an approaching panic attack as it patiently increases in volume. On tracks like ‘No Escape’, it feels like an unsettling subversion of Gonzales' pop impulses. 

She teaches songwriting at Occidental College, and during the making of this album began a PHD in musicology at UCLA. As her topic she chose female laments, saying “It’s almost culturally inscribed into our human DNA to utilize songs of women singing about their grief to process our own collective grief.”

There are obviously examples of this throughout history, leading right up to modern pop stars, and that was the framework Gonzales applied to her academic study - as well as including her own album.

I must admit, I’d quite like to read whatever she came up with for her PHD. But it’s interesting to consider No Sun as part of her research, and as a piece of work unto itself it’s cool, challenging, and practically a genre unto itself.