Mother Mother

Mother Mother are the latest in a line of quirky Canadian pop-alternative groups, hoping to make a splash in Europe after doing well in their home country. Although "O My Heart" has been available stateside since 2008, the time has come for the quintet to ply their trade over here, and as expected, "O my Heart" will polarise their listeners somewhat.
Opening with the chugging title track, it´s clear MM mean business; exactly what kind of business that is, is tough to pin down. Two parts post-punk, one part choral harmony, yet bordering on sugary pop, "O My Heart" is a catchy start. The lyrics are throwaway, and the notes veer somewhat drunkenly in sections, but overall, an enjoyable, if forgettable introduction to the MM world.
From here on in, things take a turn for the strange: second track "Burning Pile" drops the guitars and upbeat tempo for slow acoustic jangles and falsetto harmonising, losing the entire flow set up by the first track. The carnie-style bridge does nothing to allay the disjointed feel: if deliberate, it leaves the listener unbalanced, and if unintentional, it is a clear mark of the lack of confidence that MM display throughout the whole record. The feeling continues through the electro-lite stylings of "Body of Yours" and the acoustic ballad "Try to Change".
This is the clearly inherent problem with the album as a whole; it seems to try too hard to be quirky, yet the group seem to lack the conviction in their style to really commit to creating something too different. As a result, it falls between two stools of thought: too odd to go mainstream, but not quite hitting the grooves enough to go cult. Take first single "Hay Loft" - a great alt-rock riff leads into a catchy chant which is guaranteed to get people talking about the band. Easily the best song on the album, the simple tale of angry fathers with shotguns sticks with long you after listening. Yet they follow it up with Wrecking Ball, a song that would suit an advert for mobile phones - soft, lilty, with useless lyrics and over-sugared harmony breaks, and you become unable to decide exactly where the band were going - try to imagine if the Ditty Bops and Jack Johnson tried to write with My Chemical Romance, and the resulting mess would be somewhat close to Mother Mother.
There is definitely a spark of something there - "Hay Loft" and "Body" certainly attest to an interesting sound trying to escape - but the whole album falls into repetitive attempts to string out one idea by schizophrenically changing instruments, timing and styles at random, whilst still dropping in harmonies that don´t always work. MM are guaranteed to be a typical cult band - a small following of rabid obsessives wildly defending against all common sense are likely already in place - but with a bit more belief in themselves, MM could well offer something new and interesting. This certainly isn´t it, but could be the grounding for something far more breakthrough, which would cement them as a force to be reckoned with.