"When you don't particularly like someone, you will call him something like 'the sister' or 'the boss', so in a similar way, I chose the name 'The Mother'...", or so said Razali, the frontman of The Mother. Well, well, the band does indeed sounds like a culmination of bad childhood. And this Mother-ship will surely take you through a dark trip on the ill tip. Garnering slight fame after their sepia-tinted depressions on the "Flush After Use" compilation CD from 1996, the band has since developed their brand of dark and gloomy non-conformist shoegazings to new ill territories in metallic trip hop . Speaking of non-conformism, the band is an unlikely meeting of four musicians coming from very different backgrounds. Nigel Hogan is the ex-Padres guitarist, Nazim Mahat a metalhead, Bobo a rap-enthusiast and this Razali a fan of rojak.

They are musically influenced by The Smiths and Ned's Atomic Dustbin, but they have drum beats that has a distinctive Beastie Boys touch to it, and the string plays are somewhere between U2 melodic lines and doom metal. The opening track "Fooling The People We Know So Well" is an instant brow-raiser with its nusantara-moans/overtone, and the trippy beats. And the My Dying Bride-like rhythm guitars, oh my god. "Your Face" is quite a highlight on the CD, with its U2 jangles taking unexpected twists into an Arabian torch song, although not quite in same veins as the thorough U2 treatment on "Watch The Sunset", which is a very catchy, grooving track in its own right.

The other half of the CD is made up of "incomplete work" and "instrumental". I don't quite get the meaning of "incomplete work", since those supposedly half-assed tracks are running without glitches from head to toe, except perhaps sounding a tad raw and unpolished. Well, there is actually only one "instrumental", titled "Ecaf Ruoy", and it's given the "voodoo touch" by Randolf. Well, to tell you the truth, this "voodoo touch" is nothing more than "Your Face" played backward, nothing more nothing less! Uh huh, The Mother are a funny bunch.

A summation of the listening experience is an immense negative sensory overload, not in a bad negative way, but rather in a dark negative way. The Mother succeeded in casting a gloomy spell with their dark mongering and lewd fantasies (try to ask the band for their full lyrics). Well, when a band calls themselves The Mother, you'd have expected half of the claptrap up their sleeves. The CD comes as a heartfelt recommendation for those adventurous/eclectic listeners who don't mind flirting with a bit of darkness at somewhere near the ill tip.