Release Date: September 18th, 2012
Mother Mother’s soon to be released The Sticks starts with the terrible, dips its toes into an occasional groove, and ends with a screeching symphony of yikes.
On the heels of its relatively successful 2011 release, Eureka, the Vancouver-based quintet had a lot to rise up to with its fourth album, but The Sticks fails to do more than aggravate even the slightest of hangovers.
The band sticks to its trademark peculiar preludes into songs by kicking off the album with a quick, melodic tune, “Omen.” The opening track offers a slight resemblance to the morbid, childhood playground tune “Ring Around the Rosie,” fully equipped with a youthful-sounding boy’s breathy whisper creeping in and talking about digging a hole to fill with his bones. All these things would have been fabulous if the two songs immediately following weren’t so painful.
According to band-lore, Mother Mother’s founding father Ryan Guldermond started the band with the idea that the group would create “vocal driven pop songs,” something that they did with seamless ease on their last albums. Albeit incredibly pop-y, the band’s first single off of The Sticks, “Let’s Fall in Love,” is an outrageously unfortunate combination of Muse and Evanesence – yes, that says Evanesence. The tune is fun and dance-y, but the song somehow manages to generate this sense of anger that doesn’t exactly translate with lyrics like “funny little monkeys in the zoo do it…let’s fall in love.”
Along with overall pleasure pulsing tunes, this album is missing the cohesive band-sense that came with Mother Mother’s previous releases. Eureka (2011), O My Heart (2008), and Touch Up (2007) manage to melt Guldermond and his sister Molly’s vocals together in a way that is non-existent on The Sticks. Perhaps the band has tired of the course laid out for them by their label Last Gang Records; The Sticks is the fourth and final album on the band’s agreement. With overly manufactured tunes like the first single and “Business Man” the heart of the album is in question. Is this an honest try or a quick way to fulfill their contract?
There are, fortunately, moments of glimmering hope toward the middle of the 14-track album. Songs like “Dread in My Head” and “Happy” provide a refreshing view into the potential that Mother Mother holds. “Latter Days” is by far one of, if not, the most enjoyable track on the entire album. It does justice for the explosions of awful that happen earlier on the album and at the every end.
After picking up the pace with several successful tunes, The Sticks ends with “To the Wild.” The auditory shock provided by the female vocalist is staggering. Taken just as an individual song and not a piece of the primarily male-vocalized album, it would be great. Unfortunately the unexpected change of sound prompts the listener to wonder if they’ve happened upon a recording of SNL’s Abby Elliot’s impersonation of Khloe Kardashian.
The album comes full circle with that kid talking about digging his bones again. For something that could have been so good, Mother Mother fails to deliver.
Mother Mother – The Sticks tracklist:
- “Omen”
- “The Sticks”
- “Let’s Fall in Love
- “Business Man”
- “Dread In My Heart”
- “Infinitesimal”
- “Happy”
- “Bit by Bit”
- “Latter Days”
- “Little Pistols”
- “Love it Dissipates”
- “Waiting for the World to End”
- “To the Wild”
