Mother Tongues: Love in a Vicious Way Album Review

Mother Tongues make pretty, pristine music about messy, primal emotions: a brand of dream-pop that’s teeming with the sort of thoughts that can keep you up at night. The Toronto group’s debut full-length, Love in a Vicious Way, is an album of love songs, but they’re less interested in the blissful final destination than the arduous emotional journey. This isn’t so much a record of stories as a catalog of sensations: the animalistic nature of desire, the fight-or-flight response to falling for someone, the anguish of needing to know if your feelings are being reciprocated, and the grim thoughts that fester when your partner is no longer at your side.

That mix of euphoria and fear finds its musical manifestation in a disorienting sound that hovers between eras, vibes, and indie-pop subgenres. Singer-bassist Charise Aragoza and guitarist Lukas Cheung came up in the same 2010s noise-rock scene that yielded local favorites like Dilly Dally and Odonis Odonis, and some of that grungy residue could be detected on Mother Tongues’ free-ranging 2020 debut EP, Everything You Wanted. But these days, the group is closer in sound and spirit to pandemic home-recording hero Hannah Bussiere Kim, aka Luna Li, who played in an earlier iteration of Mother Tongues, while Aragoza has performed in Kim’s touring band. Like Luna Li, the Mother Tongues savvily blur the line between ’60s psych pop and ’90s dream pop, while feeding orchestral elements, Gainsbourgian grooves, and strobe-lit electronics into their cinematic swirl. But Mother Tongues are distinguished by their sense of unrest. Immersing yourself in their lustrous sound world is easy; making it out peacefully is another matter.

Unsurprisingly, Aragoza and Cheung cite Broadcast as a crucial influence on their delicate balance of retro style and spectral sonics. Having faithfully covered “Come On, Let’s Go” a few years back, Mother Tongues open Love in a Vicious Way with what’s essentially their own attempt at rewriting that song. “A Heart Beating” instantly lures you in with its cool go-go-dancer beat and twinkling textures, but its despondent, self-flagellating verses give way to an anxious chorus line—“A heart beating/Inside an animal”—that reads like a threat of an imminent attack, while Aragoza’s eerie wordless vocal incantations shift the mood from heady to haunted. The following “Dance in the Dark” then blindsides you with something you don’t often hear from dream-pop bands—a mutant metal riff—before introducing a ping-ponging, Stereolab-like hook that’s as delectable as it is desperate: “Why can’t we just be/Two lone souls floating side by side?”