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The best, most affecting singers tend to meet us at the intersection of Nuance and Intimacy Street, a corner the folk-leaning vocalist Meiko has clearly made her home. For this tight-knit collection of an even-dozen covers, Meiko and her two bandmates were ensconced in the same room at the Hirsch Center, a former church in Brooklyn, New York, around a Theoretica Applied Physics’ BACCH-BM Pro in-ear binaural microphone placed in the ears of a B&K 4128-C dummy head. Breath control and subtle shifts from syllable to syllable are Meiko’s milieu, as witnessed by how she exhales at the end of the word “baby” in one of the early lines of Jennifer Paige’s “Crush,” or the way her joyful lilt downshifts into a more ominous warning shot during Blind Melon’s “No Rain.” Her microphone-technique mastery brings us deeper into the harsh world of the Cranberries’ “Zombie” as she moves from side to side in the soundfield, getting lost in the music and the space it resides in. And her recasting of Rick James’ “Super Freak” from sex-funk raunch into modern-day social commentary simply shows an ace song interpreter in top form.
By Mike Mettler
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