Mother Tongues - Love in a Vicious Way
Wavy Haze Records
Released July 25th, 2023
Dreaming about the people we’ve lost is a profoundly bittersweet feeling, and one that runs throughout Love in a Vicious Way, the debut LP from Toronto Psych-Rock group Mother Tongues. No part of the album illustrates this better than standout track “Worm Day”, which captures the strange paradox of trying to move on from someone when they’re all you can think of. The song meditates with quiet anguish on the addictive nature of loss and the way “it rots you to the core, a wormhole to explore”. This echo of absence is invoked from the beginning of the album, with lead vocalist Charise Aragoza wondering if “it’s getting to me, all this time spent alone”, on ethereal album-opener “A Heart Beating.” This theme carries through to the final resigned line of the album: “The night it never ends, for the lonely ones”.
The album that unfolds over ten songs and half an hour is both well-crafted and honest. Ranging from melancholic to incandescent and back again, Love in a Vicious Way has grand ambitions. But please don’t mistake those ambitions for over-seriousness. Although it takes the listener on a hypnotic journey through a landscape of love, loss, isolation, and hope, this album is first and foremost a genuine pleasure to listen to. There’s a real skill to juggling such heavy themes, allowing lyrics and instrumentals to balance and counterbalance, never tipping too far to either extreme.
That Love in a Vicious Way is excellent shouldn’t surprise anyone familiar with the group’s 2020 EP, Everything You Wanted. The band’s self-described cyber-psych sound, already so well-honed three years ago, is on full display and nearly perfected here. An album as musically varied as Love in a Vicious Way runs the risk of coming across unfocused. However, while the album’s sound ranges from the futuristic techno beat of “Only You”, to the headbanging punk intro of “Dance in the Dark”, to the nostalgic twanging psych of “Luv 2 Liv”, there is always a reassuring sense of careful balance and control. The delightful dream logic of the album makes the sudden shifts in energy—or the cheeky reprise that comes two tracks before the original song—feel inevitable rather than surprising. This album was made to be listened to as you fall asleep, a soundtrack for the weird blurry space at the border of a dream. It is moving, it is surreal, and it is one of the tightest and most listenable albums of the year so far.
- Josiah Snell
