Mira Mira: Midnight For You

Multi-instrumentalist, composer, electronics artist, post-classical pianist and art rocker: Charlie Williams, frontman/songwriter for Chicago-based chamber-pop ensemble Mira Mira wears all these hats simultaneously. And it’s this eclectic merging of disciplines on the group’s 2005 debut (revisited here due to the upcoming release of EP Music for Scientists) that provides it with a multi-textured sound ranging from the sun-drenched indie-pop of “Everything Is Happening”, evoking Apples in Stereo at their most joyous, to the oscillating, avant-garde instrumental soundscape on epic closer “A Capsule Held Static”. Midnight for You is most enjoyable, however, when electronica fuses seamlessly with restrained strings and pop-laden piano lines to create subtle songs of sublime beauty like the obsessive ballad “Stalking Olivia”,or the standout title track with its intimate buzz-saw cello flitting over Williams’s hushed vocals that bring to mind the timbre of the Mountain Goats’ John Darnielle.