
Motherhood – Grow High
Nobody owns anything anymore. Regular folks don’t own the computer software they use; they use a carsharing app to go to work and live in a house that they rent out. It’s bad for the big guys, too. Where once they could hold a stranglehold on an industry, it’s harder to stop others from joining in. It’s not like they can stop others from using an idea. And trying to stamp your logo on a whole industry and call it yours is pointless.
That’s terrible if you’re a consumer. But it can be a mighty encouraging fact if you’re creating a product, marketing it, or a simple part of the creative team drawing up ideas. You can technically become the movie studio, the record company, or the radio broadcast company all through the use of your phone. Sure, there’s an inflation of similar ideas, but some have been known to be successful.
There’s then little point in sticking to a music genre if you’re in a band unless you want to play the annual fair dedicated to that style. A small niche is good for tacking up a few bucks but isn’t very exciting.
That’s why Motherhood isn’t a band content with sticking to a small island. Nah, the modern world means that they can sail as far as they can dream. On “Grow High”, they mix styles with the same daring, mischievous energy that Beck and The Dust Brothers might’ve done in the 1990s.
But from their sounds to their low-budget, creative music video, this announces itself as cutting-edge music that cuts and pastes at will. Back in the 1990s, it would’ve taken an army of producers, video directors, and consultants to come up with this. Now, it just takes a microphone and someone who can hold a camera phone steady.
Lazy Daze – New Tires
Great painters aren’t merely defined by what things they decide to paint. Subject matter in the classic paintings is just as important as the colours and techniques used to produce it. This is why the colors used by Marc Chagall or Pablo Picasso are in themselves such a subject of conversation when it comes to their work.
Painters are able to choose colours that defy logic, colours that are not the first that our collective imagination gravitates toward when trying to summon up a mental image of the scene or objects being painted. But few actively make that choice. This is a similar choice that modern musicians and songwriters avoid making. Many of them paint all of their apples red when they could be purple.
Lazy Daze makes some daring choices when it comes to production and instrumentation on the new single, “New Tires.” The guitars are drenched in reverb, the groove is muscular. But the backing vocals make this sound bittersweet, and the lead singing brings Morrissey’s odes to the woe of boredom to mind. “New Tires” is a well-designed indie-rock song that colours outside of the lines. This is one reason to encourage more such experiments.