MICHELLE MANDICO "DIMENSIONS OF MY HEART"
Album offers driving pop with complex melody, heavy imagery
By Nate Leichtman
In typical Colorado fashion, Michelle Mandico plays Indie music with a folk influence, but where bands like The Lumineers or Paper Bird head downward into melancholy and heartache, Mandico instead goes up, injecting a relentless jolt of energy into a usually downtempo musical style.
The album is tantalizingly intricate from start to finish, contrasting light, driving pop with complex melody and heavy imagery and I wish more artists had the courage to sing lyrics about the end of the world over major chord progressions and 4/4 pop backbeats.
"Heart Attacked" (my favorite track) does this with a major hook that suddenly resolves to minor for a single note. Michelle's voice has a clarity reminiscent of Regina Spektor and a tendency to add bluegrass decoration to her melodies.
When combined with a crystal clear, "no bullshit" recording style, her voice gives the album a refreshing sense of purity while the lyrics and tones hint at something brooding just beneath the surface. Michelle Mandico's driving Indie-Pop album is both brazenly original and intricately built, and her new take on the genre will have even the dourest of folk purists struggling not to bob their heads.