Ukrainian born, New York based singer-songwriter Lana Mir’s self-titled debut album is an assured and welcome slice of summery indie-pop. Full of influences like Portishead, St Etienne and her Unfiltered Records label mates The Postmarks the album is remarkably consistent and even features a laid back version of the Stone Roses classic ‘I Wanna Be Adored.’
It is this pretty good cover version that is generating most of her publicity so far, but pleasingly it is not even the best on the album. The bright opener ‘Say You Need Me’ is among my favourties, as is the infectious ‘We Started Something’
There’s a certain guilty pleasure in enjoying the album. At times it verges on being too sugary sweet, such as on ‘Summertime’ but her sultry voice pulls you back nicely just before the saccharine really sets in.
Throughout there is a sense of familiarity as well, and it wasn’t until eight tracks in with ‘We Started Something’ that it finally clicked. In both mood, pop savvy-ness and production the album is as near as I’ve heard to tracks such as ‘She Brakes For Rainbows’ on The B-52s laid back mid 80s summer pop album Bouncing Off the Satellites.
What also comes across is that while this may be a debut Mir is no mere newcomer. She sounds and writes like a seasoned pro. The PR blurb that accompanied our review copy attempts to shed some more light on this and ends up posing more questions. It seems she spent a while attempting a music career in her native Kiev but became “discouraged with the artificiality of the Ukrainian recording industry” and decided the Big Apple was the place for her.
Not sure what went wrong in the Ukraine, but on the evidence of this album the move to New York was one worth making.
7/10
by Joe Lepper, Aug 2010
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