Old Trunkface strikes back
Be afraid. Be very afraid.
The Pun Bastard interviews Mothertongue
Our head of PR, James R. Turner, caught up with Louis Smith, frontman from Mothertongue, to talk about their recently released masterpiece, Where The Moonlight Snows.
JT: Louis, thanks for taking the time to talk to me about the Where The Moonlight Snows. How would you describe the album, in your own words?
LS: Where the Moonlight Snows was our attempt to make a natural, honest album. After previously putting together as intricate and heavily-wrought piece as Unsongs (Mothertongue's first album, released in 2016 - ed.), we were wary of gimmickry, and of disappearing down a rabbit hole of caricature or self-parody. Moonlight still contains bombast and trickery, of course, with tracks like Mal de Mer and The Isle of Not Quite Right indulging our habit of pushing things to breaking point now and then. However, we’ve tried to make a record which, overall, has more room to breathe than Unsongs. It was scary to us to leave unfilled spaces and naked moments in the music, like the unaccompanied vocals in Blue, Wicked Heart, or the hollowed out arrangement of The Creature Tree. Scarier still to pass that music out to a public who might have been expecting Unsongs II. There may be moments on the album which barely feel finished, or where the obvious explosion never comes. But, well, once you’ve shoehorned Japanese disco into the middle of a punk-rock song, you need to find new ways to surprise people!
JT: Exactly how does the new album differ from Unsongs?
LS: Unsongs was definitely an “everything, plus the kitchen sink” affair. While making it we were definitely looking to come out with guns blazing. The aim was maximum impact, disorientation and a lasting impression. This time around we took a more measured approach. The goal with Moonlight was a record which would reward slower investigation, and which, while probably lighter on initial impact, would have more overall depth and reveal more of itself over time. Content wise, it’s also a more hopeful album; Unsongs was a portrait of panic, a twitching ball of anxious glee. The new record is aiming to explore more avenues for hope, feelings of calm and escape, and hopefully, to narrate some moments of actual beauty.
JT: What inspiration did you draw upon when making the new album?
LS: With 6 such disparate personalities involved in the band, a list of “fave bands” or “top 5 albums” would reveal little about what informs our music-making process. During tracking sessions for Moonlight everything from Latin street jazz, through the Stax/Motown classics, to the lo-fi garage rock of the late 60s was in heavy rotation, so it’s hard to pin down what comes from where. We were definitely inspired during the creation of this record by the pastoral locations in which we began making it, so it’s definitely more Forever Changes than Reign in Blood. Lyrically, influence comes from folklore and legends from around the world, the twisting wordplay and meta-structures of John Barth, exploratory science fiction of the 1970s and the elegant forms of machine code. The usual really!
JT: Any live shows planned?
LS: We’re currently beavering away on the unenviable task of turning a recorded document into a live show. We’re not the type to jump on stage and have a crack at replicating a record exactly in front of an audience, so there’s a lot of tearing down and rebuilding involved. We’re expecting to have some gigs booked for the summer soon, and aiming to get around as much of the country as possible to spread the word.
JT: Finally, Louis, sum up Where The Moonlight Snows for us in a short paragraph!
LS: It’s round, it’s blue-ish, and it’s got a hole in the middle! Joking aside, this is a collection of stories-in-stories, looking to imagine what goes on anywhere we escape ourselves, told over an approximation of what we think those places might sound like. You can also dance to it.
JT: Thanks again for your time, Louis!
Review Roundup
We're still getting great writeups for Charlie Cawood's masterpiece, The Divine Abstract, including a lovely piece on the Art Rocking web site.
Fractal Mirror's Close To Vapour gets a glowing write up from prog royalty Jerry Lucky here, and another corker on Progarchives here.
Our very own Tom Slatter - a real Mothertongue fanboy - reviews Where The Moonlight Snows for Progradar.
And last but by no means least, the first reviews for The Euphoric - the forthcoming album from The Fierce And The Dead - are in, at Prog Metal Madness, by Jez Denton at Progradar, and a video review at the acclaimed Classic Album Review YouTube site.
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