RED TANDY EP
Album Review
By Michael Melchor

MOTHER HIPS
"Red Tandy" EP
(Camera)

After a four-year hiatus (while singer/guitarist Greg Loiacono took a lengthy break just as Green Hills Of Earth started gaining some mainstream ground), The Mother Hips – Loiacono, songwriter/vocalist/guitarist Tim Bluhm, new bassist Paul Hoaglin, and drummer Mike Wofchuck,hjave returned with an EP of new material, Red Tandy. The band may be looking to regain some ground as far as indie popularity in a completely different landscape than the one that they had left back in only 2001.

Having never heard the band before, I had no idea what to expect going in. This album, as a result, may be a great place for those new to the band to jump on, as the music is surprisingly retro. This is meant in the nicest of ways – not as in “ripping off what came before to be successful”, but more “showing some flavors that harken back to earlier bands while writing their own niche.”

Being an EP, there’s not a whole lot of ground to cover. Four songs total – including another version of the first track. Each one of them sound like they could have been taken from David Bowie’s older vault of unreleased songs.

The good news here is that they obviously weren’t. I could almost swear I was listening to some of that, though, save for vocalists Loiacono and Bluhm sounding more modern and not at all like the Thin White Duke.

The music, however, certainly sounds that way. Poppy and psychadelic (especially “Blue Tomorrow”) at the same time, images of The Beatles, Bowie, and little flashes of Jefferson airplane make their marks here. It’s refreshing to hear in cookie-cuter times that a band can update an older sound and make it sound so damned new.