4 out of 5

Label: Hex Records

Produced by: ?

I will never tire of discovering how many new songs and sounds can be done with instruments and styles that’ve been used countless times before.

Combining Weezer-styled pop with a fuzzy, volumed, stoner-edged grunge like Big Business, Mums’ seemingly straight-forward rock shouldn’t be anything new. And yet: it hits fresh right away, from the earnest but weighty vocals to the way the melodies melt into some pretty blistering shredding, Legs makes for one of those listens that you can’t quite pin down… and so you keep listening to it, and listening to it, and then it becomes one of your favorite records. Perhaps I could attack the vocals for being too buried in the mix to really know what to sing along, but you find yourself mouthing unknown words regardless; more legitimately, the sound does flatten out somewhat past the midway point, but even here Mums has a counter – first keeping the album pretty short, but also using the tunes right past this point – I Can’t Complain, and Bent Legs – to introduce varying tempos and quiet / loud dynamics.

The charm of discs like this is you really will know, literally from the first few notes, whether or not the music works for you. The enduring charm is, as mentioned, how Mums is able to craft tunes that have this instant accessibility, but offer more than the sum of their parts, using the wiggle room of an organic sound to turn verse-chorus-verse into something consistently exciting.

A lot of times, records with hooks this solid and a sound this grabbing burns fast: I love it for the first few singles, then realize there’s not much behind it. Legs maintains that out-of-the-gates appeal, and burns it in place.