["Miracle Row"] is a disappointing production and contains no songs of the At Seventeen/Watercolors caliber found on Ian's best-selling "Between the Lines" album. (p. 144)
[Crucial] to the failure of "Miracle Row" is its dearth of strong material. Many of the new songs are inferior recyclings of old ideas. Party Lights, Let Me Be Lonely, Slow Dance Romance, Will You Dance? and I'll Cry Tonight in one way or another all touch on a theme that Ian has treated more directly in the past: the plight of the grownup wallflower who can't get over the traumas of teenage rejection, even as she recognizes the hypocrisy and shallowness of the rituals that caused that trauma. Only in the ambitious diptych Miracle Row/Maria, a detailed psychological portrait of the relationship between two women, does Ian extend herself beyond the short-form still-life songs that seem increasingly like carbon copies of a single humorless and self-pitying idea. (pp. 144-45)
Stephen Holden, "Backbeat Records: 'Miracle Row'," in High Fidelity (copyright © by ABC Leisure Magazine, Inc.; all rights reserved; excerpted by permission), Vol. 27, No. 4, April, 1977, pp. 144-45.
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