Spend just 10 seconds with the second album by Glasgow's Mother and the Addicts, and it's like John Peel never died. Frontman Sam "Mother" Smith mumbles something about a stormy night in his best Mark E. Smith mutter, while his band kicks into a gritty, repetitive groove that sounds like it's being broadcast live from the floor of BBC Radio's Maida Vale studios. "We're moving north, we're going native," the Mother goes on to say, presenting us with a fitting mission statement for a band that dutifully follows the lead of every important north-country indie export-- from the Fall and Orange Juice to Happy Mondays and Pulp-- of the past three decades.
Science Fiction Illustrated rarely ventures beyond well-established student-disco parameters, but Mother and the Addicts at least seem particularly attuned to crafting smart, snappy songs that will keep both 20-year-old white-jeaned scenesters and their 40-year-old aging-punk art-school professors on the dancefloor. Smith's lyrics hew closely to the wry, observational commentary that is Jarvis Cocker's stock in trade, pointing out other people's flaws and foibles, but in a manner that's as sympathetic as it is critical. (As he's fond of pointing out, our perceived problems are often "all in the mind.") As such, Mother sounds conflicted over whether to maintain his vantage on the sidelines or just join the party, a quandary reflected in his songs' linear but ramshackle presentation -- as he admits on "Going Native": "we tried to sell our souls, but our songs wouldn't let us."
So Mother and the Addicts split the difference between cynicism and populism, alternating regularly between urgently strummed locomotive rockers (the best of which, "Yeah Next", underpins its nervous energy with piercing piano stabs) and some hot shots of white funk that show the band's secret weapon is its rhythm section: "Watch the Lines" is a Madchester flashback given a few extra inches of bounce by a synth line that's just waiting to be mashed up with Yazoo's "Don't Go"; and the glam-disco centerpiece "Are Others" provides formidable evidence that Orange Juice's Glasgow School is still producing skilled graduates some 25 years on. But even when Mother and the Addicts are dealing in de-concentrated OJ, there's still no harm in succumbing to the urge to-- as Mother commands us elsewhere-- "sip it up." And start again.
