Eureka (2011), O My Heart (2008), and Touch Up (2007) manage to melt Guldermond and his sister Molly’s vocals together in a way that is non-existent on The Sticks. The tune is fun and dance-y, but the song somehow manages to generate this sense of anger that doesn’t exactly translate with lyrics like “funny little monkeys in the zoo do it…let’s fall in love.”Īlong with overall pleasure pulsing tunes, this album is missing the cohesive band-sense that came with Mother Mother’s previous releases. Albeit incredibly pop-y, the band’s first single off of The Sticks, “Let’s Fall in Love,” is an outrageously unfortunate combination of Muse and Evanesence – yes, that says Evanesence. All these things would have been fabulous if the two songs immediately following weren’t so painful.Īccording to band-lore, Mother Mother’s founding father Ryan Guldermond started the band with the idea that the group would create “vocal driven pop songs,” something that they did with seamless ease on their last albums. The band sticks to its trademark peculiar preludes into songs by kicking off the album with a quick, melodic tune, “Omen.” The opening track offers a slight resemblance to the morbid, childhood playground tune “Ring Around the Rosie,” fully equipped with a youthful-sounding boy’s breathy whisper creeping in and talking about digging a hole to fill with his bones.
On the heels of its relatively successful 2011 release, Eureka, the Vancouver-based quintet had a lot to rise up to with its fourth album, but The Sticks fails to do more than aggravate even the slightest of hangovers. Mother Mother’s soon to be released The Sticks starts with the terrible, dips its toes into an occasional groove, and ends with a screeching symphony of yikes.