I went to college in Iowa, but I’m from Minnesota. This meant that every school break I had to scam a ride home with a car-owning stranger. One time, I suckered the pagan kid in my art history class to drive me home. We had nothing to talk about, and five hours to kill in a tiny Mazda. For the first half of the trip, she played both CDs of the special edition “Celtic Harp Christmas” box set.
Eventually, I convinced her to let me put on a mix CD and Mother Mother’s “Dirty Town” came on. She gave me an awkward look.
“Do you think we could play that song again?” she asked.
We ended up listening to it three times in a row. We did not look at each other. The song is best described this way: Three Canadians singing in fake hillbilly accents over alternating banjo twangs and smashing Blood Brothers guitars.
I don’t want to make the band sound like a novelty. More likely they are are just weird people raised on an insular, Violent Femmes themed commune. At the time it seemed to acknowledge the entire uncomfortable experience; Mother Mother was made for these absurd moments.
Apply the band’s own logic to themselves and you will see why they work. “You don’t need a poltergeist for a sidekick,” they sing. It makes sense if you are Mother Mother: All of your friends have Dr. Moreau’s Island voices and are in your nutso band.
Plus, having a sense of humor shouldn’t disqualify you from being legitimate. Their three part harmonies are made all the more endearing by their compulsive need to crack bizarre musical jokes at every turn. Their song structures rely on breakneck stylistic shifts: Folk to punk to acid lounge, which is kind of an artistic statement, but mostly is just fun and goofy (sort of an anti-Capillary Action). And when your wise-ass smirk is a complement rather than a detriment to your tunes, you let that multi-headed charisma rooster fly.
Mother Mother are playing at the High Dive on March 31.
Mother Mother’s “Dirty Town”: http://www.last.fm/music/Mother+Mother/_/Dirty+Town
