MOTHERTONGUE
Mancunian sextet making prog pop that is enterprising yet eccentric.
On the surface, the term ‘progressive pop’ seems a silly description. Progressive music, inventive and eccentric in its nature, is the antithesis of the pop mantra, yet Manchester sextet Mothertongue have it making perfect sense. They take pop to ambitiously absurd plains: progressive in its mindset, but with an infectious, poppy beating heart beneath.
“There’s a lot of precedent for things like progressive pop,” says the band’s frontman Louis Smith. “I think those first two syllables are the most important: go from wherever you’re starting from and make progress, whatever direction that happens to be in. Our starting point is pop. What we try and do is write pop music that you wouldn’t hear anywhere else, that’s intelligent but still holding onto the fundamentals of what makes it worthwhile.”
Mothertongue’s 2016 debut album Unsongs paraded their musical adventurism with pomp and a smile. From the trumpet-tinted, triple guitar attack of its instrumentation to Smith’s witty wordplay, glittered lyricisms and the band’s utter disregard for staying in one time signature, it was a record that threw everything at you.
Fast forward two years and Where The Moonlight Snows is, initially, a moodier follow-up: a haunted melancholia coils itself around the joyous danceability. But give it time and its quirky, Beatles-esque charm will soon have you hooked.
“Unsongs was the first time we got to play with other musicians on our level so maybe we went a bit too far with it. But we had great fun writing it,” guitarist Phil Dixon reflects.“So with the new album we wanted to do the opposite: it’s bigger on romance and less of the self-conscious cleverness that was all over Unsongs. We don’t feel like we have to show off this time. We wanted to make a much more organic-sounding record and concentrate on writing strong songs. Then we’d embellish those songs and make them as interesting as we could.”
This time around they better translate their conglomeration of ideas into a more cohesive package, despite their desire to flirt with as many genres as possible. The chalk and cheese of their sound – bombastic ridiculousness versus a poetic, reserved but incisive approach – makes for a fantastic combination.
“Having six people with several genres skipping about in each of their heads means the unexpected comes naturally,” Smith says.
And while his bandmates tuck into a buffet of genres and styles, it’s his presence that anchors the band down. As bassist Will Holden states, Smith is their secret weapon: “Everything that we are is encapsulated in Louis. So that gives the rest of us freedom to experiment. With Louis we will always sound like Mothertongue no matter what direction the rest of us travel in.”
Smith’s razor sharp lyrics and characterful vocals reverberate as the soul of this band, allowing the others to go crazy. He is their centre of gravity, the method to the rest of the band’s prog and electric madness and together they work in harmony. POW