Mikaela Davis and Southern Star
Mikaela Davis is from Rochester, New York, but if her second album, And Southern Star, could be rendered as light rather than as sound, it would have the curious rich yellow of the late-afternoon, late-summer shine of the sun bouncing off the water near the coast of California.
Five years after her first album, Delivery, Davis and her longtime band, Southern Star, have more tightly focused the Americana leanings within her indie-pop inclinations. Perhaps this narrows the variety of her musical approaches; it certainly deepens the approaches she still allows herself.
One essential approach is how Davis incorporates the harp, an instrument obviously and almost indelibly associated with classical music, into more demotic settings. Pedal steel guitarist Kurt G. Johnson becomes her most effective ally, his dexterity underlining her delicacy and her flight-of-fancy fingerwork coaxing his own fingers into colorful waterfalls of notes.
Besides Johnson, Southern Star features Alex Coté, who’s as languorous a drummer on the ballads as he is a metronomically steady one at faster tempos; Cian McCarthy, handling the regular guitars and keyboards with unobtrusive skill; and Cian’s brother Shane, a bassist who’s memorably present without being showy.
With everyone taking a hand in the production and a fair amount of the songwriting distributed among Davis, Coté and the McCarthy siblings, the nine tracks thrum with a communal energy, whether rambling a la late-period Wilco on “Saturday Morning,” evoking George Harrison and Rilo Kiley on “Promise,” or delivering a Sheryl Crow groove on “Don’t Stop Now.”
Still, Davis is the frontperson, and she earns that place with a voice that hints at Crow, Shawn Colvin, and both of Fleetwood Mac’s female singers. Her youthful earnestness gives the songs an edge, and her harp gilds that edge distinctly. And Southern Star thereby tempers the California mellowness with her elegant heat.
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