Mother Mother is not only a Canadian indie rock band based in Vancouver, but they’ve also held me lovingly in a musical chokehold for the past three years. Something about their music just scratches the itch in my brain, and even though I love some of their albums more than others, I’ve never failed to find something I enjoy about each one. Although the band’s freshman album, Touch Up (2007), is far from my favorite album in their discography, I still enjoy listening to it for two big reasons: the way they combine rock with the sounds of country riffs, bluegrass, and folk music, and how Touch Up serves as the precursor to the themes of isolation, conformity, and bodily dysphoria Mother Mother regularly incorporate into their music.
Because I don’t have particularly strong feelings about most of the songs from Touch Up, I’ll instead be analyzing five songs that I believe best capture Mother Mother’s most commonly examined themes. Please note that my interpretations are my own, and I do not speak for the intentions of the songwriters.
“Dirty Town” is the very first song in the album, and tells the story of someone who wants to move out to the countryside and “wash [their] hands of a dirty town”, where they’ve presumably lived for long enough that they feel the urge to leave it. Throughout the song, the band’s vocalists, Ryan Guldemond, Molly Guldemond, and Jasmin Parkin sing entirely in a southern accent, and as the song progresses, they slowly begin to incorporate more countryisms and slang into their lyrics as the narrator integrates more into the country lifestyle, like repeating certain sounds like “a-a-a-all” to imitate the sounds chickens make and having the chorus gradually shift from “I don’t like living in a dirty town” to “get gone from a dirty town”.
“Dirty Town” does an excellent job setting both the tone and the overarching themes of not just the album, but the themes that continue to appear throughout Mother Mother’s discography. The song is their first attempt at exploring themes of isolation, and wanting to get away from a place that no longer has anything left for you. Other songs in their catalog examine themes of isolation to greater effect, particularly on their Inside and The Sticks albums, but nevertheless, “Dirty Town” is still an excellent song that has a unique sound, and, as a bonus, tells a cohesive narrative from start to finish.
“Polynesia”, the second track, is a significant departure from “Dirty Town” in terms of its tone and themes. The song talks about a group of people sailing on a ship to Polynesia, a cluster of islands located in Oceania. With slower orchestration and the vocalists stretching out the end of the lyrics, the song really does make me feel like sailing away from all my troubles and letting myself drift across the ocean. What gives the song its depth, however, is that it’s also about taking risks to find happiness and self-fulfillment. The lyrics “Remember when we said/‘You gonna see us with a sailor tan’?/We’ll think of you and your stark white hands/Building your model ships, wishing you were sailing around” imply the singers are making fun of their loved ones for choosing a life that is predictable and risk-free, for making fake models of ships instead of taking a chance on the real thing and following their passions out on the sea.
If nothing else, I do appreciate “Polynesia” as one of the album’s more lighthearted tracks, and for establishing the theme of “sailing away” from something. While sailing away is meant to be taken very literally in “Polynesia”, it has also been used as a metaphor in others like “Two” from the album Inside, where the vocalists sing about looking inside themselves during times of turmoil, and that the only way to truly do that is to “sail away” from reality—not to get away from it, but to turn inward and confront the source of their turmoil.
“Angry Sea” is a song I find deeply compelling on the album primarily because of the lyrics, rather than the music—which isn’t to say the song doesn’t sound good. “Angry Sea” is a smooth segue from “Polynesia,” because the title is similar to the subject matter of the latter, despite the different content.
Supposedly, the idea behind“Angry Sea” is“all the problems in the world today in the form of a tsunami that is crashing on a perfect and pristine beach”. However, I interpreted it to be about refusing to conform to the way everyone else is living, which is another major theme that’s prevalent in their other songs, such as “Baby Don’t Dance” from Eureka and “Normalize” from Grief Chapter. The narrator refers to the concept of conformity as a parasite and a disease “that everybody’s got these days”, and even goes so far as to compare it to getting a lobotomy. The lyrics themselves are almost mournful, and the slow acoustic guitar adds to the more somber tone.
Quite fittingly, “Legs Away” is a great song to listen to if you’re going on a walk, and I can’t count the number of times I’ve timed my footsteps to the laid back instrumentation and easygoing beat of the song. However, despite its lackadaisical vibes, the content of the song is quite sad if you pay closer attention to the lyrics, which tell the story of how the narrator’s been lost all day, and that they desperately want to “wish” their legs away since they’re taking the narrator “nowhere safe”.
Mother Mother has written several songs revolving around the concept of your own body rebelling against you. Some of them are much darker in tone, with prime examples being “Body” from O My Heart and “Calm Me Down” from Eureka. “Legs Away” is decidedly much lighter in its tone and content, and its lyrics lack the themes of extreme dysphoria and body horror as its cousins. However, I don’t believe a lack of graphic themes or imagery makes “Legs Away” an inferior song, it perfectly fits in with the rest of the songs in the album’s tone and themes.
This is my favorite song on the album! Like “Angry Sea”, where the lyrics tell the story of someone who chooses to live their life the way they want to. That’s where the similarities end, however: ”Tic Toc” is not only the shortest song on the album, clocking in at just over a minute and a half in length, but it’s also incredibly fast-paced, reminiscent of a child who has a habit of speaking too fast for people to catch what they’re saying. In this case, however, it’s very much intentional.
Moreover, the lyrics and the way they’re sung support this theory—as well as being sung very quickly, the lyrics are also more immature and confident utilize the repetition of phrases such as “I’m not listening to you”, which almost makes the singers sound like children who won’t listen to their parents. This is achieved without actually making the singing sound annoying or childish. The main reason I enjoy and resonate with this song so much is that I was that kid who spoke too fast for people to catch what I was saying, albeit not on purpose. I got reprimanded for it a lot, and I guess deep down, it was nice to hear a song where people spoke fast anyway and didn’t care what other people thought about it.
Although it may not have seemed like I had much good to say about Touch Up, as I stated before, I’ve never had difficulty finding something I love about every single Mother Mother album, and Touch Up is no different. I adore Touch Up for not just establishing the musical tone and themes of the band as a whole, but for also managing to stand out as a unique entry to their discography, even almost two decades later.