The Mother Hips
Back to the Grotto (American)
by Jeff Fritz
The most obvious thing that can be said about the Mother Hips is that they don’t make music that will necessarily appeal to the dyed-black contingency of Boston’s club-going public. Instead, they are a quartet from Northern California that manages to pull off an intelligent blend of retro-psychedelia and rough-hewn harmonies recorded raw on a CD that sounds nice and warm and analog.
If you listen closely, you hear a lot of diverse stylistic tricks popping out of the aural hat. The Mother Hips’ constantly changing tempos blow off in more directions than the listener can shake a rain stick at and, for the most part, this keeps the songs from becoming bogged down in the kind of Grateful Dead-style “space” drivel that inevitably puts you to sleep once whatever drugs you’re on wear off.
On the contrary, with the re-release of their ’92 recording Back to the Grotto (American), the Mother Hips appear to have achieved an intriguing synthesis of the more interesting characteristics of mid-70s art rock and four-way window pane that sounds sort of like Phish with much rougher edges and no Berklee-type chops.
However, this same style of constant structural evolution in the span of a song makes it hard to tell where one track ends and the next begins. This is not to say that the CD blends into one long psychedelic haze, but perhaps the Mother Hips were meant for the stage and audience feedback to fuel their improvisational segments. They sound like they’d be a better live band than one trapped in a studio.
So, if you’re looking for something shiny and new and innovative, or for something grungy and primal and gut-wrenching; keep looking. The Mother Hips don’t pretend to boldly go where no band has gone before, and the 21st century music/technology/attitude explosion isn’t relevant to what they do. If you’re looking for a good disc to rock you while you kick back and spark up, then the Mother Hips’ Back to the Grotto is just about what you’d expect to get from a Bay Area acid rock band in the last decade of the 20th century: Good, clean, liquid fun.
