Mother Mother
O My Heart (Last Gang)
Those Canadians always get a bad rap. Mother Mother have been fondling genres in the dark and came up with O My Heart, nothing short of a tasty revival my ears needed.
‘Wrecking Ball’ is on to a winner from the start as the banjo is sounding brilliant on any track right now and this is no exception. The vocal harmonies act as a beautiful surplus and often help whilst trying to overlook the terrible lyrics that riddle the majority of their songs. And then you realise this is maybe what the Scissor Sisters intended on sounding like but got caught up in a pile of shit.
Things get confused and shaky with ‘Ghosting’, one of the more mellow songs on the twelve-track album. The dual harmonies of the sexes could entertain crazy ideas of an Abba of the 21st century, if it wasn’t for the redundancy of the lyrics but it doesn’t really take away from the overall enjoyment of the song, apart from when you find out that cutesy, intricate guitar work is accompanied by the words:
“You don’t need tricks, you don’t need treats, you don’t need tricks, you don’t need no Halloween. You don’t need treats, you don’t need tricks and you don’t need me.”
Well, what else would you expect on a song called ‘Ghosting’?
Favourites rarely tend to surface on the first listen of an album but O My Heart is full of tangible ‘hits’. ‘Sleep Awake’ is the best use of female vocals on the album, slumbered at points and woken by the garish screams and fellow female harmonies.
Mother Mother’s follow-up is a solid effort and instantly likeable in every musical sense, it would be intriguing to see if they could retain this high-standard live.
Ross Dunn
