It’s fun to imagine our favorite musical artists having their own favorite musical artists, and who those might be. Sometimes, while listening to albums, I create supergroups in my brain and think of how awesome it would be if the artists who create the soundtrack for my days and nights got together to share a stage. It would be, well, anyway … what I’m trying to say here is that Thao Nguyen (Thao With the Get Down Stay Down,) and Mirah have discovered that they are big time fans of each other’s music, and have put together their own little collaborative supergroup called Thao and Mirah with The Most of All. The two ladies performed together for the first time earlier this year as part of the Noise Pop Festival in San Francisco, where Nguyen lives and Mirah has recently relocated to from her long-time home of Portland, Oregon. Thao and Mirah with The Most of All played a show here in Brooklyn the other night at the Music Hall of Williamsburg and proved that the creative chemistry between them is intense.
I stopped counting the number of songs being ticked off the evening’s set list at the 15 mark, but seeing as though Thao and Mirah are lugging their own respective suitcase of material to each show, there’s a lot of ground to cover, so brevity isn’t possible here. They played an even mix of Mirah and Thao songs, sometimes giggling to the audience about being nervous to sing “karaoke” versions of each other’s songs, in front of each other. Seeing the two on stage together created a well-rounded experience of rough, hyper rock – and jumpy, thumpy melodic folk/pop melodies. If Thao and Mirah were the main characters of an all-girl buddy movie, Thao would be the rebellious rocker by night/mechanic by day, with a heart of gold, and Mirah would be the local elementary school teacher who hides in-between headphones and scribbles song lyrics into a notebook while eating a sandwich in the teacher’s lounge on her lunch break. I tried to take this further by describing Mirah’s on-stage dance moves to a friend as being “mom-like,” and she got really defensive. People will defend Mirah, AND her dance moves. It’s *that* serious because she’s *that* good.
Opening for Thao and Mirah that night was Brooklyn’s Chica Vas, who, from where I was sitting, looked like a stage full of about 72 of the coolest girls you’ve ever seen, beating on drums, and making you want to backflip off of a unicorn because your body couldn’t physically handle the pure joy of the music they were making up there. I’m not gonna go much further into this because they will have their very own blog coming up soon soon soon.
[video:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TUDVOyjSUJQ 425×344]
