With the late February release
of its debut record, When You
Walk A Long Distance You
Are Tired, indie-rock quartet Mothers
plunge into the melancholic singersongwriter
tradition upheld by a string
of stormy songstresses harboring
somewhere left of the dial.
Featuring idiosyncratic vocals
reminiscent of Joni Mitchell and Joanna
Newsom coupled with the melodic
sensibilities of more contemporary folk
outfits like Angel Olsen and Sharon
Van Etten, the ensemble is the fleshedout
project of frontwoman Kristine
Leschper, an alumna of the Lamar Dodd
School of Art who garnered a deal of
success as a solo artist in her college
town of Athens, Georgia.
Featuring idiosyncratic vocals
reminiscent of Joni Mitchell and Joanna
Newsom coupled with the melodic
sensibilities of more contemporary folk
outfits like Angel Olsen and Sharon
Van Etten, the ensemble is the fleshedout
project of frontwoman Kristine
Leschper, an alumna of the Lamar Dodd
School of Art who garnered a deal of
success as a solo artist in her college
town of Athens, Georgia.
A thoroughly conceptualized example
of freak folk for the thinking man — an
eccentric species of folk music hovering
on the brink of the avant-garde — the
album succeeds in analyzing the
plaintive motions of heartbreak from an
artist’s discerning perspective. Indeed,
as Leschper’s mezzo-soprano gracefully
dances across a series of contrasting
pitches, we witness a painfully selfaware
spirit confront her own character
flaws while examining the shards of a
collapsed relationship: “You love me
mostly when I’m leaving / I was half
gone when you met me,” she decidedly
muses in “Lockjaw.”
While Mothers doesn’t revolutionize
the indie rock genre on any dramatic
level, it manages to accomplish the feat
of portraying the emotive exhaustion of
the journey from defeat to closure in just
over 40 minutes. From the shimmering
mandolins of “Too Small For Eyes” to the
roots rock slow burn of “Hold Your Own
Hand,” Mothers guides its listener
through an invisible odyssey
across the jagged landscape of
loss that risks never coming to
full completion, a lyrical revelation
that beautifully unfolds as simple,
honest and universal truth.
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This article appears in Apr 6-12, 2016.