Review: Mikaela Davis dishes up starlit pop magic on ‘Delivery’

“Bitches get stuff done,” Tina Fey once aptly surmised during a now-famous SNL skit back in 2008. At the time, Hillary Clinton was in the running for president and came under undue fire, as women are so often subjected to nasty, mean-spirited and misogynistic jargon harpooning their ambition and drive. Men are strong and determined; women are just bitches. Fey later quipped with fine and saucy relish, “Bitch is the new black!”

“Bitches,” or rather resilient, accomplished, talented and fierce women, have heart and compassion, which they know goes much further than spouting frivolous, gross and entirely unnecessary invectives. Pop rabble-rouser Mikaela Davis, whose power mantra happens to be Fey’s powerful insight, does her damnedest to throw caution to the wind and shatter the glass ceiling. Her debut album, Delivery, sees the Rochester, New York native spreading her wings with enchanting, pixie dust-smattered indie-pop. Flushed cheeked with bursting fireworks shooting across her eyes, Davis melts together bubbling lacerations only electric guitar can inflict with angelic elixirs concocted in some woodland tucked away from all of existence.

The singer and songwriter, who studied classical harp at music conservatory and previously eyed a career in the symphony, unlocks the burning in her chest through “A Letter That I’ll Never Send” and coming full circle. “Last time we partied, you told me you’d see me again / At that very moment, my starry eyes blew away with the wind,” she remarks, then striking on a goldmine of a revelation. “Driving away from the city felt like cutting my hair / First, it felt wrong then I realized when I looked in the mirror I saw my mind was clear.” In uprooting those feelings, scrawling them frantically onto paper, Davis is unchained from the past, perhaps for the first time in her life. The clutter has been lugged out into the backyard, soaked in gasoline and lit on fire, the images falling away into ash or up into the chilly evening sky. The flames lick away the pain as much as they do the outer edges of the Milky Way.

“Emily,” written by band member Alex Coté, who also smacks on thick, volcanic drums and other percussion throughout the record, serves as another of the most crucial, heart-born and -torn compositions. “Unlock the door, maybe I can be your friend,” Davis prompts, her voice so delicate, you unwittingly obey. The harp work aches as remarkably as Davis’ voice, threaded with precision, and as the only instrument textured beneath the equally-dainty but durable background vocals, owed to English folk-rock trio The Staves, it is thoroughly intoxicating. Broadly, that’s the enthralling, practically supernatural, state of the full runtime of Delivery, produced by Grammy winner John Congleton, known for his work with St. Vincent, Lucy Dacus and Lana Del Rey, among numerous others. Shane McCarthy’s bass playing acts as a magnitude 8.6 earthquake, shocking the ground in charged bolts and propelling Davis ever-forward.

“Do You Wanna Be Mine?,” a daring and playfully chewy proposition, ricochets across distorted guitar tears and the ruffled drum kit. “Don’t go making accusations, oh no / Let’s go up into the unknown,” she calmly but assuredly offers. The light bounces from her gaze, and while the future might be foggy, the uncertainly invigorates her. Davis unplugs her head from the sand with “In My Groove,” which conversely sinks into a gurgling funk that reflects her journey from angst into self-awareness.

From start to finish, Davis wrestles with being comfortable in her own skin, the harp not only dancing alongside her but, in many regards, embodying the parts of herself that she’s still uncovering and assessing. “Get Gone” babbles with gnarly electric guitar, often pinging like a boomerang back and forth over vocoder-filtered vocals. The scraps of hand percussion exacerbate her chest pains, braying in the dirt before gravity takes hold and it plummets to the bottom. Davis is poised but reserved, assertive but not aggressive, unhurried but insistent. With “Little Bird,” there is a lofty presence of darkness crawling below her, as if she hasn’t exactly arrived to where her destiny actually lies. The Staves, of Jessica, Camilla and Emily Staveley-Taylor, return for “Pure Divine Love,” a psychedelic marrying of alternative rock and weightless, heavenly folk music. Davis flips and bends around an arrangement that is downright off-kilter and hallucinatory, but its dream-like, trippy condition bookends a record that’s utterly transcendent.

Delivery takes painstaking care to addresses issues of the mind, from misery to self-loathing to renewal to self-worth. Davis carves her name into the hardened sand long abandoned by the ocean’s waves that linger only a few feet away. She might be parched, gasping for breathe and dangerously brittle, a storm cloud has collected on the horizon. Time will heal all.

Photo Credit: Jacalyn Meyvis

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