Embark on a Rock-and-Roll Odyssey With Mirador’s “Feels Like Gold”
O muses, wield your guitar like a sword and sing to me of romance, of rage. Weave a tale, thick and twisted as a tapestry, of an odyssey shaded with tales of riches and woe, battles won and lives forfeited, feats of valor and wit.
Rock has accompanied fantasy themes and imagery since the 60s and 70s, when the rise of psychedelic rock accompanied an aesthetic medieval revival within the counterculture movement. The association was solidified in the 80s with the dramatic, fantastical stylings of metal and glam rock. Mirador, the swashbucking rock-and-roll duo of Chris Turpin (Ida Mae, Kill It Kid) and Jake Kizska (Greta Van Fleet), is the latest acolyte of this tradition.
Do music fans crave the return of the bard? Mirador took a modern minstrel approach to their debut by touring before releasing any of their music onto streaming, including playing at the Bottlerock Festival and opening for Greta Van Fleet’s STARCATCHER tour. (Yes, Jake Kiszka opened for himself.) While Mirador’s audience siphons from fans of the artists’ other musical projects, the excitement around this collaboration attests to the mystique and ephemerality of life performance that takes precedence in memory over a recording.
Kizska, the guitarist of Greta Van Fleet, makes his vocal debut alongside Turpin, the frontman and guitarist of Kill It Kid and vocalist alongside Stephanie Ward (also from Kill It Kid) in their husband-wife duo Ida Mae. Fans of both musicians will recognize both Turpin and Kiszka’s songwriting influence in the collaboration, their playing styles blending just as well as their vocals within their folk-and-blues-inspired sound.
The lush melody of Mirador’s debut single “Feels Like Gold” swoops and slides, ebbs into cavernous suspension, then roars back like a cresting wave. The song’s fluidity and texture captures the best of rock’s calculated intensity and technical skill, and I would expect nothing less from a band formed by two guitarists.
“Feels Like Gold” crafts the scenery and tone of the rest of the album with its opening lyrics—”There’s water rising on the ridge, the lowlands are covered in smoke / a deep quiet descends and the night falls like a cloak.” The titles of other announced tracks on the album, such as “Roving Blade,” “Raider,” and “Fortunes Fate,” are nothing short of piratic. Batten down the hatches, because Mirador is going to take rock fans for an epic ride.
Mirador’s eponymous album will make its debut on September 19. Until then, presave the album, watch the live performance of “Feels Like Gold” aptly played in a medieval thirteenth-century church, and make haste to their upcoming tour dates.
