The song imagines divine intervention as a summons: open your mind, rebel against illusion. The divinity doing the summoning is not the bearded patriarch of Sunday school. She is feminine, powerful and untamed, and the music gives her the weight she deserves. The sound is heavy and atmospheric, built on explosive dynamics that let silence do some of the frightening. Quiet passages gather like weather, and when they break, the muscular hooks arrive with the force of revelation. This is music for the person in the back pew who has started to count the exits.<\/p>
The vocals are the heart of it. Kelsey Montanez and Hannah Hovland Johnson share the lead, and they work as two instruments with contrasting grain. Montanez’s voice is evocative and pulls you in, while Johnson delivers her lines like an uppercut, direct and unarguable. Together they sound hypnotic, an incantation that alternates between coaxing and commanding. When the two lock together, the effect is a matriarchal spirit speaking in stereo, and the song’s title feels less like a name than a presence in the room.<\/p>
Behind them, Jesse Greco’s guitar work supplies the tension. His parts are layered and dynamic, and they build an atmosphere that is assertive and slightly feverish, the sound of a pot approaching the boil. Nothing is decorative. Each line of guitar adds pressure, so that the whole track feels like a crowd of disillusioned people finally getting loud. Producer Noam Wallenberg of Rax Trax Recording keeps that pressure intact, leaving the band raw enough to bite while giving every element room to land.<\/span><\/p> CHANNELS name Interpol, Queens of the Stone Age, Muse and Radiohead among their influences, and the pedigree shows in the right ways. The brooding precision of the first, the swagger and low-end menace of the second, the operatic ambition of the third and the restless questioning of the fourth all feed a sound that remains firmly their own. This is rock music in the plain, proud sense: guitars, drums, big choruses and nerve. The band’s name proves apt, since they sound less like authors of these songs than conduits for them.<\/span><\/p> The lyrics, philosophical and mystical by design, are the quiet triumph. They invite reflection without lecturing, which is harder to manage than any riff. The mood is closer to enthusiastic wonder than to angry rejection. CHANNELS treat the old existential questions as an invitation, and the music makes the search sound like the most exciting activity available on a Friday night.<\/span><\/p> A single is only a first sentence, and this one is confident enough to make you impatient for the paragraph. “MOTHER” is loud, strange and sure of itself, and it announces a trio worth following from the very beginning. Turn it up, open the windows, and let the illusions fend for themselves.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n\n
<\/span>