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Showing posts with label Mother Mother. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Mother Mother. Show all posts
Live Reviews: Mother Mother w. the Racoons and Laura Smith
0 comments Posted by Andrew Kurjata Posted Tuesday, February 10, 2009
As promised, here is my review of the excellent Mother Mother show at Sugar Nightclub this past Saturday night.
First off, let me give you my impressions of Sugar. Having been to enough concerts with drunken/hopped up idiots, I appreciate their high level of security-- everyone was scrutinized, and any possible problem-causing material taken away. However, nothing can protect you from the decor.
I'm all for dives, but generally dives involve concrete or wood. Not carpet. Sugar is completely unique to my experiences for being a bar with carpet. From the 80s, too, by the look of it.
Having been to so many shows recently that were in a theatre setting, it was somewhat disorienting to find myself in a bar, without assigned, or, well, almost any seating, save a few chairs, a couple of booths, and a questionable looking couch. But after grabbing a couple of drinks, we soon carved out a little corner for ourselves to listen to the music.
The first act was one Laura Smith, who I know nothing about. Her music seemed to be in the vein
of the indie-chanteuse that's so popular nowadays and that you can find in almost any town. She performed ably and the crowd was appreciative, although she definitely seemed better suited to a coffee shop than a dance floor and pool table venue.
Next up were the Racoons [sic], whom I'm gathering are turning into something of hometown heroes around here. I'd listened to a couple of their songs prior to the show and found myself shrugging, but that changed once I saw them going
live. I'm rarely converted to a completely unknown band solely on their live performance, but in this case I was. They occupy a sonic density somewhere between Bloc Party, Tokyo Police Club, and Wolf Parade, with lead singer Matthew Lyal recalling some combination of the latter's Spencer Krug and the Kaiser Chief's Ricky Wilson. I'm not going to talk too much about them here since I grabbed a CD and plan on doing a full review, but suffice it to say they're likely going places.The Racoons hyped the crowd up sufficiently for Mother Mother to take the stage for a room of
happy people. With their band's name hanging behind them they opened with a high-energy rendition of "Hayloft" from their newest release, O My Heart. New singer/keyboardist Jasmin Parker fit in seamlessly, with her vocals melding in perfect sync with the brother-sister combo of Ryan and Molly Guldemond. Despite the darker post-punk tendencies of the music, these two clearly come from a country/folk background based on their vocal harmonies and Ryan's guitar-picking style and tendency to keep said guitar above his waist, not to mention his Chris Isaak-style coifs. While the enthusiasm of the female singers was infectious, it is Ryan who occupies centre stage, and for good reason. He is an entertainer, playling like a man possessed-- at times, he acted as if his finger-picking hand was getting away from him and there was nothing he could do to control the results.What would have been an enjoyable show became a great one when drummer Ali Sidait and bassist Jeremy Page started the instantly-recognizable rhythmic pulse of "Body of Years." They wisely played up the introduction, slowly building the parts with Ryan semi-improvising the opening riff. This is the song that very-rightly won the CBC Radio 3 Bucky Award for "Best Vocals" and my fear going in was that the band wouldn't be able to replicate it's sonic range in a live setting. Well, they can and they did, to great effect. After the jam session on the end of the song, which works far better live than on record, they wisely kicked immediately into the next song so as not to lose any momentum. Other bands take note: this is the mark of a professional-- switching gear is cool once in a while, but if you want to keep the crowd going, you use the gear you're holding while the audience is hyped.
While this one-two punch was easily the pinnacle of the night, the denouement didn't lack for excitement. While Mother Mother's two existing records, Touch Up and O My Heart, each have unique sonic qualities, they are similar enough that songs from each record can be blended together without coming off schizophrenic. They also threw in a new song, the name of which I didn't catch, into the mix, and this one seemed to be delving further into the 60s-girl-group harmonies the band has
flirted with on occasion. Other highlights included "O My Heart," the haunting "Ghosting" (which garnered a huge reaction from the crowd with it's somehow-snarky line "You don't need no treats, you don't need no tricks, and you don't need me," and the encore-opener "Dirty Town," which, with its shifting styles and time signatures, really let the band show what sets them apart from anyone else.This was Mother Mother's last date before heading to the United States to open a series of shows for the Sam Roberts Band. It's really too bad that they'll have to condense their show into an opening act, because these guys deserve to be headliners worldwide, and if they perform as well as they did last week for the rest of their tour, they soon will be.
Mother Mother: official site, Myspace, tour dates
The Racoons: myspace
Laura Smith: myspace
I'm Totally Going to See This Band!: Mother, Mother
0 comments Posted by Andrew Kurjata Posted Saturday, February 07, 2009
So even though I'm "of" Prince George, I'm not currently "in" Prince George, having taken a gig in Victoria for half a year or so. During this time, I'm taking advantage of the change in locale by going to a bunch of great shows that, unfortunately, don't and probably won't come up to PG (until I do something about it, that is). I've already seen Sam Roberts with the Stills, Kathleen Edwards, and Jeremy Fisher, and today it's Mother Mother. Interestingly, I got into the band as a result of my fact-finding mission to Victoria while looking for a place
to stay. I'd thrown together an iPod mix of bands I'd wanted to check out, and the song "Body of Years," was in there. Normally I'm not a fan of the 80s style production, but as my ltgf pointed out the odd goodness of the song, I couldn't help but agree.
It's been in constant rotation since then, as has the rest of the album Oh My Heart, the follow-up to the band's 2005 debut, now-called Touch Up. I think what really works is the arrangement-- it's got a clean, minimalist feel, but manages to maintain the vitality that's often sapped from those sort of projects. It'll also be my first trip to Sugar, and I've noticed the opening act is Victoria group the Racoons, who seem to be generating a fair amount of buzz themselves. Oh, and Mother Mother are originally from Quadra Island, so it's something of a hometown show, which is always good. This tour marks the debut of new vocalist/keyboardist Jasmin Parker.
From mothermothersite.com:
O My Heart is Mother Mother’s second album on Last Gang Records (Metric, DFA 1979, The New Pornographers, Crystal Castles) and since its release in September of 2008, has achieved great milestones:
- #1 on Chartattack’s weekly Campus Radio Top 50 for four weeks
>- #1 on !Earshot’s weekly Campus and Community Radio Top 50 for six weeks
- #1 on !Earshot’s monthly Top 200 for two consecutive months (ranking at #13 in the Top 200 albums of 2008)
In its yearend accounting of noteworthy albums during 2008, iTunes Canada positioned O My Heart as:
- #3 Best Canadian Album of The Year
- #3 Best Indie Album of The Year
- #5 Best Alternative Album of the Year
- #5 Best Overall Album of the Year
The song “Body of Years” won the band a CBC Radio 3 Bucky Award under the category of Best Vocals and was rated #31 by iTunes for Best Song of the Year - All Genres. South of the border, O My Heart made its American debut as the #6 most added album on CMJ’s Top 20 weekly adds, charting as high as #24 on the CMJ Top 200."
I'll let you know how it goes.
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