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April, 2001
Don't
Judge A Sound By Its Crowd
I was recently talking to someone in the workplace kitchen about recent inspirational works of sound and song. I mentioned something about not being able to turn off the new Mother Hips album, Green Hills Of Earth(Future Farmer Recordings). To this my coworker responded, "Aren't Mother Hips a hippie jam band?" Egad! Since their musical birth in the outland, collegiate backyards of Chico, Calif., Mother Hips have either been pegged as toe-jammers or Alt Country hopefuls. But if you can't judge a book by its cover, why should you judge a band by its audience? Mother Hips formed in 1991, the same unfortunate year Grunge broke. Like any healthy music group, the Hips discovered early in their career the power of an open mind and the endless plethora of rich musical genres that can only thrive in such a headspace. They also learned that no band should make the same album twice -- something they've avoided in their four albums since their 1992 debut, Back To The Grotto(American Records). Now, with the near-perfect conceptualization and delivery of this year's Green Hills Of Earth, Mother Hips have birthed an opus that is sure to sever any comparative ties with stick jugglers and pungent detractors of footwear. Since the band has grown and matured enormously with each recorded effort, it comes to me as no surprise that Mother Hips' fifth album is their triumphant tour de force. Trust me gentle reader, you haven't heard anything this year that's as stunning and exquisite as Green Hills Of Earth. The album seems to have been written by four Californians who were relocated in their pre-teens to an Earth-orbiting space station with nothing at their disposal but classic love stories, vintage musical instruments, Casio keyboards, cosmic sun flare, and a mason jar of sand to remind them of home. "Given For You" opens this flowering full-length with a minute-long ditty that beckons for tranquility. What follows is a lovingly tangled web of songs that bends light as would a tree with prisms for leaves, forming an intergalactic rainbow of sound. The album's overall sound texture is a perfectly offset harmony of warm, familiar roots and chrome-dipped mutations. "Take Us Out" passionately winds up the album in amorous vocal harmonies, emitting the kind of pop sensibility that was once only heard from the mind-vaults of a pre-stroke Brian Wilson, a bearded Paul McCartney, and the psyche-pop era brothers Gibb (think "Cucumber Castle," not "Stayin' Alive"). But Mother Hips' own take on symphonic guitar pop is a voice purely their own. There's nothing affected here and nothing derived. While many of their songwriting ideas give nimble nods to the past, they don't exercise a feel-it-and-steal-it system of song craft. What we have here is pure innovation -- as oxymoronic as "pure innovation" sounds, it makes perfect sense when discussing this organic and mechanical collection of songs. Green Hills Of Earth seems perfectly balanced on scales of purism and evolutionary permutation alike, while its lyrics seem to come from age-old, imaginary books -- unwritten masterworks, if you will. And the songs themselves seem to come from antiquated vinyl as well as unseen, futuristic tone vessels. "Del Mar Station" is one of the album's subliminal masterworks. The song seems to take on three different personalities that make up one entity. Furthermore, if you've ever wondered just what perfection sounds like, "Sarah Bellum" is everything a perfect love song should ever be: catchy, swooning, pensive, heartfelt and transcendent. To quote W.H. Auden's Leap Before You Look, this song has the power to make "tough-minded men get mushy in their sleep." It's but one of fourteen galaxy-farmed masterpieces of sound, space and time on this record -- an album that's anything but a soundtrack for foot bag enthusiasts or patchwork drum circle participants. Although they could probably dig it, too.
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