From my first experience with university finals to an awesome New Years my last month...wait it's been two months?! Well that's my bad then, but I would like to talk about the new(ish) Mother Mother single. It's called Bright Idea and like seemingly every other Mother Mother song it gets critiqued based on the band's past songs. Even when they're second album came and introduced nearly everyone to the band, people still questioned a guy singing that high. On its own Bright Eyes is a decent song, certainly not revolutionary but it doesn't deserve to be shoved under the rug like so many people have been doing.
This leads into the thing I've been thinking about for a couple weeks now: the expectations that are caused by past accomplishments. Mother Mother is a fine example of this but a more personal example for me is Hey Rosetta!. Into Your Lungs remains one of my favourite album of all time, being a cohesive album with sappy trumpet and string parts that make me feel things that I don't normally feel. When Seeds was released I listened, wasn't sure what to think, then I listened again, waiting for that same feeling, and then I listened again and again and again... then I gave up hope. It just wasn't as good. So why would I listen to it again? I went back into a trumpet haze.
Now if you look at the albums together, like I did, I still feel like Into Your Lungs is superior. But if you look at them individually, completely separating the band from the album, looking solely at the content of each you realize Seeds is certainly worth listening to. It is clear is has much more production value and sounds more "hi-fi" then previous albums, but it's missing that emotional attachment that Into Your Lungs had. This may be a very verbose way of saying what I did earlier: listen to the MM single and don't compare it to old MM stuff...as hard as it may be.
-Chris
