{"id":22892,"date":"2022-05-05T05:30:01","date_gmt":"2022-05-05T09:30:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/?p=22892"},"modified":"2022-05-04T16:23:56","modified_gmt":"2022-05-04T20:23:56","slug":"album-review-the-mommyheads-swiss-army-knife","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/2022\/05\/05\/album-review-the-mommyheads-swiss-army-knife\/","title":{"rendered":"Album Review: The Mommyheads — Swiss Army Knife"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"The Mommyheads released their debut album Acorn<\/i> in 1989. A wholebuncha<\/em> albums followed; the prolific Brooklyn-based group would release four more albums before going inactive in the late \u201890s. When they returned around 2008, their reissues and new albums created a large catalog. These days the band seems to alternate between new and archival reissues, and all of it\u2019s worth hearing.<\/p>\n

One of the band\u2019s earliest releases was a cassette-only set in 1992 called Swiss Army Knife<\/i>. Issued in extremely limited quantity \u2013 100 hand-copied But even then \u2013 some 30 years ago \u2013 it was a vintage recording. Recorded in the mid 1980s, Swiss Army Knife<\/i> collects the earliest known Mommyheads recordings. The band issued a \u201cdisclaimer\u201d with review copies in which they emphasize that the recordings contain \u201coodles and oodles of analog tape hiss and wow & flutter.\u201d<\/p>\n

Swiss Army Knife<\/i> includes 21 tracks, three of which are live recordings of the band onstage at legendary New York City venue CBGBs in 1988; none of the band members had yet reached his 19th<\/sup> birthday at that point.<\/p>\n

The aptly-named \u201cFreak Out Jam\u201d is a herky-jerky affair that suggests these kids may have been ingesting some Residents, DEVO and similarly offbeat material. But then there are songs like \u201cLemon Meringue People.\u201d That song has an appealing if slightly off-kilter melody supporting delightfully oddball lyrics. Bratty humor surfaces in the song titles: you\u2019d expect \u201cUndress Me With Your Golf Ball\u201d and \u201cStop Squeezing Nipples\u201d to be a little weird, and indeed they are. As it title might suggest, \u201cCactus Farm\u201d bears the influence of Camper van Beethoven (at least to these ears, it does).<\/p>\n

\u201cHigh energy\u201d isn\u2019t a descriptor that applies to most of these studio tracks; that\u2019s not what they\u2019re about. Instead, they\u2019re the product of clever and talented youngsters who are still in the process of developing their collective musical personality. The live tracks, however, have a seething undercurrent that showcases a band with one metaphorical foot in a kind of nervy punk energy, the other in an experimental, art-rock mindset.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s certainly a youthful character to the songs, but even as teenagers The Mommyheads demonstrated a remarkably sophisticated approach. The songs are deeply layered; they\u2019re not \u201cstrumming acoustic guitars and simple vocal\u201d type tunes. The production values \u2013 such as they are \u2013 place the songs in an appealing context. No one would mistake the tunes on Swiss Army Knife<\/i> for professional studio recordings, but the music is strong enough that the collection is enjoyable on its own merits, not simply as a curio of interest to those already won over by the Mommyheads\u2019 collectively idiosyncratic style.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Mommyheads released their debut album Acorn in 1989. A wholebuncha albums followed; the prolific Brooklyn-based group would release four more albums before going inactive in the late \u201890s. When […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":22893,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[39,64,65],"tags":[3626],"class_list":["post-22892","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-indie","category-reissue","category-review","tag-mommyheads","cat-39-id","cat-64-id","cat-65-id","has_thumb"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22892","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=22892"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22892\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":22894,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22892\/revisions\/22894"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/22893"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=22892"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=22892"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=22892"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}