Mothers – Render Another Ugly Method
The second album from Kristine Leschper’s Atlanta outfit Mothers, Render Another Ugly Method reaffirms the band’s talent for making the familiar sound so strange
'Show me a beauty routine / To erase me completely,' sings Kristine Leschper on Render Another Ugly Method's opening track, BEAUTY ROUTINE. The second album from Leschper’s Atlanta outfit Mothers, it reaffirms the band’s talent for making the familiar sound so strange.
Collaborator Matthew Anderegg is the only other constant on a record described as a montage of “cut-up songs that were torn apart and re-built." Render Another Ugly Method’s tracklist feels more like a landscape – rolling and folding in on itself, like belly fat or a mountain range. Ticking, tripping, sometimes fragile polyrhythmic time signatures provide the architecture for an album that tries to contain so much of the world within its walls, and Leschper’s lyrics are precisely worded confrontations. 'Are you still afraid of my want?' she asks, with an eyebrow arched, on PINK.
Penultimate track WEALTH CENTER_RISK CAPITAL makes most clear Leschper’s preoccupation with the body. Throbbing and uncanny, on a first listen it paints a kind of dystopia, but as she states, cool and clear: 'I am excited by the prospect of living without a body,' it becomes instead full of promise and potential. What if we could live without our bodies? What if we could wriggle out of our fleshy prisons and find some other rules to live by?
Listen to: PINK, BEAUTY ROUTINE, WEALTH CENTER_RISK CAPITAL