Critic's Pick: Mirah

Mirah Yom Tov Zeitlyn’s 2000 debut album You Think It’s Like This but Really It’s Like This sounds like a classic take on artless bedroom pop today. Mirah took an extended break from recording after she released 2018’s Understanding, which peaked with a nice bit of minimalist semi-pop called “Lake/Ocean.” On her new full-length Dedication, the New York singer and songwriter sounds fresh for someone who’s been recording for three decades. Dedication is a post-pandemic and post-Trump album that cuts the wooziness with some well-judged indie-folk-pop that updates the style Mirah favored a quarter-century ago — the album’s “After the Rain” is lush and depressive in equal measures. Dedication contains a couple of excellent tunes that sound like the New Wave-influenced rock of the 1980s, which may strike fans of minimalist indie pop as incongruous. “Stumbling” and “Catch My Breath” owe a debt to The Cars and Blondie, and they’re among the best things Mirah has done to date. It could be that she has actually been a covert pop musician throughout her career. Still, Dedication works in the confessional and somewhat downbeat mode that Mirah favors — when she complains that “reanimation is a rotten deal” in “The Ballad of the Bride of Frankenstein,” you believe her. Ashley D. opens.

8 p.m. at Drkmttr

1111 Dickerson Pike