Mother Mother
Grief Chapter
WARNER
Mother Mother started almost two decades ago now, but this ninth album demonstrates that the Vancouver five-piece hasn’t settled into anything even remotely routine. Blending gloriously poppy hooks with glam-rock sensibilities, Grief Chapter, as the title suggests, is a record obsessed with death and dying. It’s not, however, one that dwells too much on the darkness. That’s here, of course—it’s impossible for it to not be—but for all the sadness and emptiness and abject nothingness that loss brings, the truth is that life goes on. Days, weeks, months, years, and decades pass, and although you’re never the same again, the lacuna shifts, slowly replacing that grief with happy, warm memories. There will always be sadness, there will always be tears, but little by little there will be more and more smiles.
All of which is to say that Grief Chapter is a powerful meditation on the real nature of death. Its 12 songs come off both musically and lyrically as whimsically serious, or perhaps seriously whimsical. They confront death, but they don’t fully succumb to the emotions that are expected to come with it. Except, that is, the title track. The last song on the record, “Grief Chapter” is profoundly plaintive, inspired by a text conversation frontman Ryan Guldemond had with a friend who’d been experiencing a lot of death around them and which incorporates their messages into its lyrics—including one which inspired the album and song title. Yet before that, as much as the likes of “Nobody Escapes” (lyrically a kind of updated, more morbid version of Cole Porter’s “Let’s Do It”), “End of Me,” “Days,” and “Forever” all wade through the swamp of mortality, they do so with a seemingly impossible spring in their step.
Whether that’s Guldemond, his sister Molly, or Jasmin Parkin—who proclaims she’s “never happy without my sadness” on the sweetly sentimental ditty “Goddamn Staying Power”—on the mic, it results in an album that actually makes death seem more bearable, less heavy. “Explode!,” for instance, is an up-tempo electro-indie banger that emphasizes the need for joie de vivre before death eventually takes us. That’s something “The Matrix”—which channels both Suede and Bowie, the latter all the way from his own grave—also does. After all, you can’t have death without life, and as the band points out on the aforementioned “Nobody Escapes,” nobody escapes death. Grief Chapter is an important, inventive, and inspiring reminder to make the most of it while we can.
