SINGLE MOTHERS
Single Mothers EP
2011
I found out about this band through Last.FM. In the Okkervil River shoutbox, someone posted:
All the girls at this party, they're into drama and Ginsberg and lemon lime bacardi; they're into Okkervil River and trying to get to know everybody.
"Wow!" I thought, before I figured it was a reference. Last.FM poetry. I was excited, this heralded to me a new age of more inspired shouting and tweeting and all that jazz. I should have known it wasn't what it seemed.
The first thing you might notice about Canadian post-hardcore band Single Mothers is the gruff production. Since they only have glorified demos for now it might not be intentional, but the production values nicely mirror the sense of uncertainty that they express about the world around them. Awkward self-awareness raised to the level of art.
The narrator in Single Mothers songs spends a lot of time playing it cool. "This ain't a date, it's just coffee". But sometimes he admits that the whole thing is just a charade, and gets to the heart of the matter. "It's hard, I only have short term goals, and I hardly ever follow through with those." In a song called Nice Dresses he proclaims that "whores in nice dresses are still whores once you undress them". The whole world is just permanently dressed up for the occasion, and no one cares about the naked truth, for it is ugly.
Shallowness is a popular theme these days, but what is refreshing is that the singer puts himself square in the middle of it, not as a neutral external critic.
"All we want to meet is someone out there with a little integrity". Authentic is one of the keywords of the 21st century, and we have yet to agree on a definition that does not shift when you stroll around it.
Winter Coats is my favorite song of theirs. The title references to an analogy that is quite crude, but I like it anyway. He says the girls should be wearing winter coats, since they act 'so cold'. The song culminates in a mantra of ALL MY ANGELS ARE ETCHED IN SNOW, a desperate expression of always staying with the cold abstract, never being able to arrive at the realization of what you are looking for.
