Sep. 26, 2012 - Issue #884: Strangelove
The Sticks
Mother Mother {recordings_bands_mg} The Sticks {/recordings_bands_mg}
Last Gang,
2
With The Sticks, Mother Mother has achieved a sound that builds on the darkness of 2008's O My Heart and pulls in the big production of 2011's Eureka. Its take on slightly off-kilter, harmony-driven songs with keys and guitars trading off behind the vocals has hit an apex: with The Sticks, the band has never made a more consistent album. Or, to be honest, a less intriguing one.Spearhead single "Let's Fall In Love" has a gritty rock wash and smooth build to it, but lyrically—and this is probably the biggest issue on the album—it wanders the fine line between strange and, more frequently, inane. Across the board, head Mother Ryan Guldemond's oddball wordplay, which has proven deftly effective in the past, seems put to poor use all over this thing.
Take the microscoping lyrics of "Infinitesimal," at its breakdown: "Do you ever think really think about the grains? / Every little one's got a million things / Every little bit's got a million bits / And that ain't it." A Calvin and Hobbes comic made the same point with more beauty and deftness in half a sunday page than this does in its three-minute runtime. That askew worldview feels forced most of the time, like on the everybody-do-it chorus of "Let's Fall In Love" ("Dread In My Heart," a runaway acoustic drive of a song, makes an excellent exception to the rule, and is the album's best song.)
Is The Sticks awful? No. Mother Mother's still a band adept at channeling its darkness into hooky riffs without seeming bland or banal, and its propensity for melodies is perhaps unparalleled in modern radio bands. Sonically the group's been moving in this direction for years, growing bigger with each album, and while that's involved dropping a lot of endearing little quirks—like the way the drunken-folk hoedown "Dirty Town" could bleed into the playfully strange "Polynesia" on Touch Up—it's the lyric sheet that makes The Sticks seem like a homogenized, calculated balance of accessible and odd. This from a band that used to genuinely run wild in the same pasture. . You could do far worse for your pop music, but The Sticks will still leave you in want of the wilder years. vueweekly.com comments: powered by Disqus
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