Mia Doi Todd released her last album ‘Cosmic Ocean Ship’ on City Zen Records and it cannot be a more appropriate name for her quiet, calming music, and for her whole persona; on stage she moves slowly and gracefully, speaking with a very soft voice to the audience, murmuring to her musicians. Everything appears outside of time in her universe of serene ballads about the sea, rising tides, and the summer.
She and her two musicians were performing an acoustic show at Amoeba on Sunday afternoon with songs that would make you feel like lazing on a sunny Brazilian beach. But what you notice right away is Mia’s impressive voice, light and eerie, floating, gliding and escaping over the guitar, the timid percussion (essentially bongos) and the contained bass that the player was holding like a classic guitar. As a matter of fact, I read that she is a classically trained vocalist, and she sure hits the highest notes effortless.
Wearing a long summer dress, some feathers on her shoulder, her face surrounded by her long wavy hair, she hardly moves and looks like a Botticelli painting gone a little exotic, or hippie, and even her ethnicity is difficult to identify; if she has some Asiatic descent from her mother side, she sings about Brazil or Cuba with a song even called ‘La Havana’.
The music was nonchalant and sometimes melancholic or nostalgic, sometimes more uplifting, but always sensual and warm like the sun, building a repetitive melodic groove behind the vocals. ‘It’s a summer song’, she said before one of her tunes, but they all sounded as summer songs.
The bass player soon removed his shoes, and Mia did some songs in Spanish, which for some reason accentuated the beachy feeling.
All along the set, there was this latent soft quiet bossa-nova-lullaby feeling, all passion restrained, which could make you really comfortable and all mellow inside, but the songs were staying a little bit too much on the same theme and mood, but then I watched her video ‘Open Your Heart’, directed by Michel Gondry, and I thought she had certainly more to offer.