Anaïs Mitchell "The Brightness" (Righteous Babe)
By Kimberly Rosenbauer
Thursday. Mar 15, 1:39 PM
Puts you right to sleep.

I hate to be picky and all, but The Brightness is… well, not so good. The fact that Anaïs Mitchell is signed to Ani DiFranco’s Righteous Babe label – and that she has a unique childhood of growing up on a sheep farm and traveling through the Middle East and Europe studying global politics – makes me truly want to like her. I just can’t.

Warning: I’m going to be blunt.

The first thing that irks me is her baby-like whiny voice. I keep thinking to myself, “She can’t possibly talk this high and froggy… why is she singing like this?” Maybe you could take a song or two here and there, but as for a whole album, her voice quality really gets on your nerves.

My next major problem is that the album as a whole feels like one big loooong song with several movements rather than a record with several tracks. Meaning that every stinking song sounds the same. Her guitar and vocal melodies are distinctly alt. folk style, which does not offend me in the least. In fact, I was impressed by Mitchell’s talent in writing and performing all of her own songs, I just wish she had a little more creativity within this genre of music. Every track had the same ebb and flow from verse to chorus and the same dynamics to her voice. In fact, every other song is either three or four minutes long.

Finally, to make things worse, Mitchell’s lyrics are basic and mindless. Lots of repetition where writer’s block set in and clichéd imagery prevailed. In “Namesake”’s chorus she sings: “Everybody knows you / nobody knows you! / everybody knows you / I want to know you!” Ugh. Then on “Song of the Magi,” “Merry Christmas everybody!” It’s the Bethlehem story just in case you want to hear it again… in March. “A child is born, born in Bethlehem, born in a cattle pen / a child is born on a killing floor, and still no crying he makes / still as the air is he, lying there so prayerfully there, waiting for the war.”

Mitchell is trying to be some kind of epic storyteller through her chord-plucking and history of traveling the world. Well, all she did was put me to sleep.
www.anaismitchell.com
www.righteousbabe.com

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Kimberly Rosenbauer

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