Self Worth
Captured Tracks
Nov 11, 2020 Web Exclusive
It’s an art form to make angry music sound like you’re having fun at the same time. Yet MOURN seem to have mastered it in spades.
As with the rest of the population, it’s been a challenging time for the Barcelona collective. Founder and former drummer Antonio Postius left the band last year, with the remaining members Jazz Rodriguez and Carla Perez Vas citing both creative and personal differences for their parting of ways.
Nevertheless, what that also gave them was the impetus to write and complete a new record, and while Self Worth isn’t as brash or in one’s face as its predecessors, it unashamedly represents the sound of a band coming to terms with having left adolescence. Indeed, it’s easy to forget just how youthful MOURN were when their self-titled debut came out six years ago.
Since then, they’ve established themselves as one of the most incisive post-punk outfits to emerge from a renegade scene that’s become more over-ground in recent years, and rightly so. Aided and abetted by new drummer Victor Pelusa and Jazz Rodriguez’ sister Leia on bass, the newly combined foursome have created a record that sounds as if it was enjoyable to make, even if some of its lyrical themes and subject matters suggest otherwise.
Recorded over the course of last summer, Self Worth is sometimes confrontational and occasionally provocative, but never anything less than honest. “Call You Back” and “I’m In Trouble” channel their anger into insatiable bursts of energy while the delectable, shoegaze-tinged “It’s a Frogs World” might just be the most exquisite composition in MOURN’s canon to date.
Elsewhere, “Stay There” and “Apathy” make being pissed off sound pleasurable in a perverse kind of way before autobiographical closer “The Family’s Broke” draws a line under fragmented relationships and closed ties.
Overall, Self Worth is the sound of a band coming of age. Which is no mean feat for a band who’ve done their growing up in public. (www.mournct.bandcamp.com)
Author rating: 7/10
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