RED TANDY EP
Album Review

By Roy Opochinski

The long-awaited return of The Mother Hips – the band has not released a new album since 2001’s The Green Hills of Earth -- will disappoint many because of its brevity. Though it is only meant to be a brief taste to hold over the group’s fans who have been clamoring for a new release from this talented California band, the three new songs on the EP (four if the alternate version version of the title track), the disc feels like a tease.

Admittedly, it is a ridiculous criticism, but when you finish listening to the four tracks, you wonder how you’re going to spend the next fifteen minutes and the next fifteen minutes after that. Fifteen minutes of The Mother Hips just isn’t enough.

The aforementioned title track immerses the listener immediately in the warm embrace of California’s sunshine and doesn’t let go. You find yourself grooving on a guitar-drenched wave.

“Colonized” details the clash of civilizations between rampant commercialism and the human soul. If that sounds heavy, don’t worry, it isn’t. Rather, the powerful guitars on the track propel the anti-commercialism message of the song as they mix so elegantly with sonorous Beach Boy melodies (a pattern they repeat to great success on “Blue Tomorrow.”)

The alternate version of “Red Tandy,” expanded and more twangy than on its first appearance on the disc is also more compelling in this lengthier take.

The Mother Hips’ Red Tandy is a delicious amuse bouche that does little to sate one’s appetite for the group’s new album. Instead, it leaves the listener longing for more, which is more than one can say for most releases.