by Maria Bobbitt-Chertock (@mariab4christ)
Miranda Winters – a veteran of Chicago DIY, best known for her work with Melkbelly – makes surprising, knotty music. She’s a smart guitarist with an affinity for tricky rhythms and phrases. With two Melkbelly LPs and one solo LP under her belt, she’s a master of the kind of idiosyncratic alt-rock we might associate with Lily Konigsberg, Sadie Dupuis, or Emily Yacina. Her impressive new single All-Purpose, a colored vinyl 7” and digital download, comes out this month via Exploding in Sound Records.
All-Purpose’s twin tracks celebrate awe. Awe in daily life, awe in the act of writing. Awe in the strange pleasure of free-association. Miranda wanders from one thought to the next, refusing clear-cut beginnings and ends. “What am I reminded of?” she sings on the A-side track, “Double Mirror Light.” “I am haunted by a dozen things daily,” she sings on the B-side, “Little Baby Dead Bird,” which turns out to be less concerned with death than with living curiously. “What will happen next? / And after that?” she wonders. Her lyrics stick to disparate objects and impressions like scattered flour.
At first, the trail is hard to follow. There’s no obvious direction, especially since there are no drums in Miranda’s solo work. She meanders intentionally, of course, and she does it well. Her solo LP Xobeci, What Grows Here? was quite spare – just voice and guitars – and hard to grasp at times, but her new single boasts new sounds and clearer contours. Both tracks’ string arrangements uplift moves that the listener might otherwise have missed. Friends, including Lillie West of Lala Lala, contribute vocals on side-A that strengthen the refrain. Miranda’s songs sound precise here, but still playful, wandering, thoughtful. She keeps the listener on their toes, darting from one impression to the next, pleasurably without purpose at all.