Mothers - "BEAUTY ROUTINE"

photo by Tonje Thilesen

While the debut full length album from Philadelpha via Athens experimental rock quartet Mothers When You Walk A Long Distance You Are Tired seesawed between sparse introspective lyrical moments and complex, interwoven instrumental pyrotechnics, one of the main differences I've noticed between the debut and previous singles "BLAME KIT" and "PINK" from Mothers' upcoming sophomore full length Render Another Ugly Method has been an all-hands-on-deck type of inclusion. Where their debut often saw Kristine Leschper's vocals under a perennial spotlight that occasionally saw the band lessening their intensity, on Render Another Ugly Method, the foursome have established a new dynamic: one that lauches Leschper's vocals right into the dense, instrumental din.

"BEAUTY ROUTINE", the third single and opening track from the forthcoming record establishes an unexpected moment of quiet, much more reminiscent of their debut while featuring the much more fractured lyrical style that Leschper's been exploring on this new record. Much like "PINK" was a series of vignettes, strung together by the particular feelings they evoked in Leschper, "BEAUTY ROUTINE" follows a similar style of disjointed narrative structure. There's no chorus, or even vaguely conventional approach to songwriting here as Leschper stretches and elongates the delivery of two rather brief verses. But much like an actual beauty routine, Leschper's lyrical delivery is methodical, gradually building and the rest of Mothers follow suit. It's not until almost two minutes in where the band snap into action from their previously listless expansiveness. Unsurprisingly it's also where Leschper turns her lyrical focus outward. It is slight but "BEAUTY ROUTINE" falls into Leschper's pervasive interest in the body as a malleable thing: capable of being expanded and contracted, and even abandoned completely. The first verse - aloft in a dissociative haze before a moment of jarring self-consciousness shifts the focus towards actually engaging with another person as the second verse's lyrics are about the self but delivered outside of the self. Much of the ethos of "BEAUTY ROUTINE" is a matter of Leschper's thought process during its composition but she lets others in, and none too gently with the song's final line: "Show me a beauty routine to erase me completely".



The music video, directed Jake Lazovick and Richard Phillip Smith, is a case of the visual enhancing the audio aspect as the ideas behind the track become the video's sole focus. Leschper carries a small hand mirror with her, glancing at herself in it but from the audience's perspective, you never get a good view of what she sees and the glances you steal into the mirror they appear to be reflecting something completely other than Leschper. Eventually Leschper does away with the actual mirror and decides to create a homemade mannequin in her own image: she gives it her own hair, models its appendages after her own and even dresses it up in her own clothes essentially creating the image she hopes to see in the hand mirror. Much like the video for "PINK" which was also directed by Lazovick and Smith, there's a creeping sense of malaise that lingers until the very conclusion.



Render Another Ugly Method, Mothers' sophomore full length album is out September 7th on Anti- Records.