CONCERT REVIEW: Mother Mother thrills, challenges Edmonton in sold out show
There’s no logical reason why Mother Mother should prosper in a cookie-cutter music industry bent on presenting the Next Best Thing, only to dupe listeners with yet another derivative result of generic engineering.
But then, this Vancouver quintet has been clogging the cogs of the starmaker machinery for the last 15 years with an eclectic arsenal of idiosyncratic material. Friday at the Jubilee Auditorium – the biggest local venue Mother Mother’s hit to date – the band proved that they still have the last laugh.
Which makes it hard to believe that Mother Mother would prefer to call their latest album and companion tour Dance and Cry. There wasn’t a single case of waterworks among the 2,500 folks assembled to check out an 18-song set that ran for 90 minutes, including a three-song encore. It wasn’t without some tongue-in-cheek effort from lead singer and guitarist Ryan Guldemond, however. “You guys seem to be doing fine,” he remarked near the beginning, as the crowd responded in cheers. “It seems like every human entity here is doing well, which means someone is lying. I’m not buying it!”
That was after their melancholy grand entrance with a funereal organ drone to kick off I Must Cry Out Loud, which effortlessly kicked into the title track of the new outing. A seamless segue into hits O My Heart and Let’s Fall In Love immediately followed, executed with the deftness of a well-oiled Mercedes. While Guldemond declared that the latest album would be far more organic than previous releases, the new offerings fit in well with many of their standards that ooze with the lushness and darkness of The Cure and Human League.
Much of that has to do with the signature glue that holds all those tunes together, namely the three-part choral interplay between Guldemond, his sister Molly and Jasmin Parker. Guldemond and chanteuses, doubling on keyboards, have a knack for delivering the unpredictable, hitting lesser-used notes on their scales of choice, switching unpredictably into show-stopping refrains and engaging in vocal volleyball on some of the faster numbers. Those gymnastic achievements were particularly evident in The Drugs, Get Up, and The Stand, one of their earliest hits.
It wasn’t just in those pipes. Media assessments have never adequately assessed Guldemond’s skill on guitar, which he picks at with ease, whether banging out chords with whiplash frenzy or squeezing out juicy leads, including an awesome extended intro to Hayloft. The rest of the outfit are no slouches either, with Molly and Jasmin adding multidimensional richness from their keyboards, with understated bassist Mike Young laying out deep foundations and drummer Ali Siadat providing the tightness to weave the whole thing together. So precise was Mother Mother, Siadat never had to count the group into a song at all.
An additional treat for the crowd took place right after their 2008 work Body of Years inexplicably morphed into Radiohead’s classic Creep, as Molly Guldemond left the crowd gobsmacked with her rendition.
Proof of Mother Mother’s musical evolution was particularly obvious when Guldemond and vocalists went retro to their early folkie days on a ditty called Dirty Town. You could tell the group was quirky from the very beginning, but the song’s simplicity was a far cry from the sophisticated crafting of later tunes. After 15 years, Mother Mother might have proven there’s life between the cracks of prefabricated genre mortar, but establishing that beachhead hasn’t been without a great deal of elbow grease and songwriting moxie.
Said the Whale might be a band that could reach Mother Mother’s stature one day, but their warmup set indicated they’re not quite ready for prime time. Although they’ve amassed a string of national hits like UnAmerican, Wake Up and I Love You, the Vancouver quintet performed in a din of sludginess, and the onstage energy wasn’t up to par with what fans have heard on record. While likeable and engaging as an act trying to reach the next level, the group still has a bit of work to at least make their live set memorable.
