Mia Kim – Who Is Sukey Rose?
Los Angeles-based artist Mia Kim re-emerges with a concept album about the mysterious and fictitious Sukey Rose, aptly named Who Is Sukey Rose?. Kim landed Jason Martin of Starflyer 59 fame in the producer’s chair for this, her sophomore effort, so I was going into this knowing there would significant style changes from her purely acoustic-driven debut, Rumour of Flight. For the most part those changes are positive.
I’m not one to down producers because they often tame artists that would otherwise go hog wild with their material. There are a few tracks, most notable the first couple, where I think Martin’s seasoned instrumental hand played a little too strongly and overpowered Kim’s dynamic vocals and cryptic words (I couldn’t tear my ears away from the creeped out bassy piano in Oh, Sukey Rose, to wit). But this is a relatively minor offense.
The best stuff comes in the form of a quintuplet of consecutive tracks situated in the album’s midsection, starting from Marionette and ending with Evangeline. This is were Kim seems to shine the brightest with her solid harmonies and a little more acoustic fingerings in the forefront. War is perhaps the strongest marriage between Kim’s singer-songwriter tendencies and Martin’s rocky backdrop – an element that Kim didn’t have in poppy Rumour but is a welcome departure in this release.
The broad swath of time between releases may have given Kim ample time to whittle away the bark from her songs and formulate what she really wanted. A considerable genre change between an artist’s first and second albums could spell an early death if not calculated correctly, but Kim pulled off the transformation with compelling success.
