plorentz's Full Review: Girls And Boys [Digipak] by Ingrid Michaelson
Two ceramic figurines - one boy and one girl, angels perhaps, in Christmas-y colors, in a state of apparent courtship - grace the cover of Girls and Boys the debut full-length by Staten Island-based singer-songwriter Ingrid Michaelson (originally self-released in early 2007). With her song "The Way I Am" now teasing the upper reaches of iTunes' song download charts, she's just one of the latest beneficiaries of the ascendant hit-making prowess of television ad campaigns and soundtracks to prime time dramas for with-it twenty-and-thirtysomethings (not to mention YouTube and MySpace); and those figurines on the cover provide an unsurprisingly appropriate indication of the music within.
Michaelson's songs, which, in fact, deal mainly with girls and boys (or girls and girls) in various states of courtship (and are almost always set in winter), in general, have a porcelain delicacy and innocence to them. These are the kinds of songs where a (possibly lesbian) French kiss can be described demurely (in "Glass") as one tongue tying a pretty little bow with another. (Awwwww.) And even given the occasional flight of production extravagance - the cacophonous climax of "December Baby", for instance, a whirling cyclone of looping melody, noisy guitar textures, and various other unidentifiable flying objects culminating in a brief moment of silence followed by a torrent of vocal-less sound - the record's pervasive do-it-yourself warmth provides the necessary crackle in the figurines' glaze.
If the plucky, music-box adorable melodies of "The Way I Am" (matched to the song's nursery rhyming couplets and its cloying reassurance that Ingrid would "buy you Rogaine when you start losing all your hair") threaten to escalate an arms race of indie-fried cutesiness against Feist's ubiquitous "1-2-3-4", it's nevertheless hard not to love her for it. Because Michaelson really does have more than a well-assembled collection of adorable melodies going for her.
There's her voice, for instance. Michaelson's singing is, of course, clean and pure, melodic and girlish and earnest, but her voice also conveys a breathy intimacy, something just a tiny bit smokier than one might expect; and she's not afraid to pull out a few vocal stops to heighten the sense of her songs' urgency. On the fabulous opener "Die Alone", she splices together a trio of guitar strums and some overdubbed a capella vocal harmonies (strum-strum-strum; ah-ah-ah) to create the song's central riff; and she creates a delicious bit of chaotic drama on the chorus, layering various vocal parts including a whooping falsetto hook over a full-band wail as she sings about coming to the sudden, devastating realization she's vulnerable to loving someone other than herself.
As a lyricist, too, she seems either naive enough or bravely foolish enough to write verses which have the potentially embarrassing, candid quality of dubious dorm-room-blog poetry - a tendency which is more often (though not always) more endearing than emetic. In "The Hat", a song full of sweet longing and surprising time changes, she recalls knitting a too-small cap for her teenage paramour and waxes oh-so-sincerely nostalgic: I should tell you that you were my first love. Meanwhile, she asserts her adult independence, and then sorta takes it back a little with a playfully suggestive line - you play the boy and I'll play the girl - on "Overboard".
But for as appealing as this record often is, it's also easy to imagine a little bit going a long way (and, in fact, the middle part of the record sags a bit). As much as I'm loving them now, I can see myself wearying of Ms. Michaelson's adolescent-adult romantic pinings by the time she gets set to put out a follow-up, especially if these songs keep on turning up in Old Navy ads. Still, as indie-pop debuts go, Girls and Boys is surprisingly loaded with promise.
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BECAUSE YOU NEED TO KNOW:
"Girls and Boys" by Ingrid Michaelson
Cabin 24 Records
Released 2007
Produced by Ingrid Michaelson
45 min.
SONGS: Die Alone - Masochist - Breakable - The Hat - The Way I Am - Overboard - Glass - Starting Now - Corner of Your Heart - December Baby - Highway - Far Away (hidden track)
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