[review 2004: the honourable mentions]

Mirah Yom Tov Zeitlyn put out three albums over the course of a year, but C’mon Miracle was the album proper. Her collaboration with Ginger Brooks Takahashi was for a good cause but otherwise unspectacular; the album of protest songs she did with the Black Cat Orchestra was similarly uneventful. You can guess where this is going.

If You Think It’s Like This But Really It’s Like This was the wide-eyed child and Advisory Committee was the experimental, “difficult” adolescent, then C’mon Miracle is the record chronicling the adult years up to the midlife crisis. In other words, it’s very pleasant but somewhat lacking in conviction. In trying to strike a balance between her first two albums, Mirah has lost what made both albums so interesting; it’s like taking a bunch of bright colours and mixing them thoroughly until you get a uniform brownish-grey.

The best songs on C’mon Miracle are the ones that approach the moods of her earlier albums. “Don’t Die In Me” sounds like an evolution of the material on “Advisory Committee,” and has more emotional punch than the rest of the album. The album closes with a relative throwback to Mirah’s early material, “Exactly Where We’re From.” Again, the song sounds more like an evolution of her Storageland and You Think It’s Like This days rather than a straight rip, and is better for it. But between moments like these, there are pleasures more slight and less fulfilling to be had. So it’s hard to write off the album because it’s so easy to digest, and if pressed hard, you could say something very charitable about every track. Come back two weeks after a listen, though, and it’s unlikely you’ll actually remember much of the album.