Long tracks are one thing. Single-track records something totally different. A 44-minute-Post Black Metal album completely unusual and not that frequent on top. Mother from Oostende, Belgium have done that again with their second full-length II and I love it!
With this record and review Veil of Sound goes nearly full-circle again. Back in 2021 when we started our video channel and also, along with it, the perfect love affair between our friends (yes, friends!) in Consouling Sounds and us – they asked us to do some video interviews which were to become a part of the festival, and so we interviewed some mighty fine acts: Barst, Insect Ark, Ovtrenoir and Mother. Back then brothers Toon and Tuur Soete and bass player Lynn were just about to (re)release their first record via CS. And guess what – they just released their second full-length through Mike’s label, so it’s time to have a spin!
Lynn, Toon and Tuur have created a sound that is mighty interesting as it’s equally Black Metal in sound and Post-Hardcore/Metal at its songwriting core. They play with the dynamics of the latter, the classical “loud vs. quiet” parts with some amazing build-ups and, maybe even more important, some breathtaking fade-aways. On a record with only one track and no obvious track endings and beginnings, these outros (if one can use that term for a one-track-record like this one) are really the item to make or break a record. For example, when they slowly fade out one passage after roughly 30 minutes, there is only one guitar part, that is quite clean and slowly disappearing in volume (even though the intervals between the repititions stay the same) – and then after several nearly inaudible bits, the same guitar comes back at the same interval with a much crunchier, much more distorted sound. That then leads into a “doom-drums meets industrial guitars” part with some spherical ambient beneath it. All quite astonishingly well done, the experience of the trio is obvious here. They know what they are doing, and the spoken word passage crowning the new part is perfectly adjusted to its needs.
And then there is the other dimension of their music – the storyline they have been trying to tell since their first record: The mother, the most often most important figure in more or less every person’s live. The person, whose love and care can surely signify the strongest influence in our lives. The one, that strengthens our love for live and desire for new things. But what if that one doesn’t care whether we need her? If we need anything like a hug not just a “Well done”? If our self-esteem could be boosted by her and her alone? Then that mother figure turns into a tyrant. Into someone who is not good for us. Whose lack of loving turns us into the love-hungry zombies whose fight against authorities stems from a lack of confirmation from the mother. That is the plot of their story which they will tell in multiple chapters, this one is the second installment, the review for the first full-length and the Interlude-EP can be found here. One can see, that the band surely knows how to interweave a story with personal experiences and heave them onto an abstract level so that they become much more than they were before – a general assessment of human life.
This new chapter in Mother’s self-titled story and journey into the human psyche is ripe with great structures and perfectly balanced build-ups and slow descents. It is a tidbit more atmospheric than the first full-length and as the band is fleshing out this direction a bit more, the audience is drawn to the qualities this record is already overflowing with!
