Hickeys ‘Motherlode’ is Wild and Intimate, a Debuting Tour De Force
On their anticipated debut, Motherlode, Hickeys (the nascent grunge foursome in Madrid) let it all hang out in a miasma of confessional heartache that’s been locked in a compelling generational heart-shaped box. It is a surreal, experimental, avant-garde album: moody, poetic and fraught with intense conflict. Gestures of grieving and mourning over false and withheld promises of a world in present decompose, a motherly witches’ sabbath (in the form of being born with horns) takes on carrying the lode as a form of healing for all and sundry in eloquently solemn communion and reclaiming rebirth.
Hickeys, circling around in immense meditation by virtue of anger and frustration, shifts their volatile voice from quiet caress to raw-throated fury. The eye-popping band feel there’s no place like home within the walls of the ‘90s darkwave scene with their ominous, risqué, atmospheric sound.
‘Circuit Lies (You Don’t Have To Know)’ showcases a different bruise of Hickeys, a more diamond in the rough sound of heavy-punk rawness since their fun and carefree song, that was “Hickey Hickey Bang Bang.” The music video, wherein menacing red strobe light falls, is especially haunting. Hickeys pen a pent-up thrilling mystery of repetitive tightrope leisure, where motionless mannequins substitute for socialite strangers in gatherings that lack the ability or strength to move nor speak or display any emotion. Tortured souls genuinely look heartless.
During the two uncensored decades that MTV has been a flagship of cutting-edge cable-television and mind-blowing musical montages, many of the musicians and video directors have showcased intense, calculated, and a little intense choreographic works of visual art. And as for Madrid’s Hickeys, all dappered in white slick suit lounge attire, pigeonholed through security cameras into drunken reverie, and has pursued to obey the same “creepy and eerie” theatrics across the screen — hence dragging mannequins in place of human beings and making them more captivating to watch.
And for those who aren’t familiar with Courtney Love and her role as the frontwoman of Hole, the brooding imagery and the reality of Hickeys, an emerging hard-to miss, kiss bite, bite kiss (as their name suggests), would make the late Kurt Cobain of Nirvana blush.
The debuting Motherlode album, operative to be released in 2022, explores new territory for an uninterrupted youth and pushes against commercial forces with their cavernous, grunge-inspired explicit trash-rock anguish of young America in the nineties. Characteristically, a musical vision of togetherness through conflict, and even fear. There’s no tantrum, argument, and or drama within the head-turning foursome, just a genuine relationship between best friends, in essence, sisters.
Motherlode, irresistibly, is a wild and intimate tour de force; a melancholic portraiture of modern noise-rock that prizes old-school intimacy and captures how far the band is willing to defy expectations. Hickeys, with more sharply honed songwriting have sharpened their songstress focus, it doesn’t get any more Sonic Youth meets Stereolab than this unblemished masterpiece! This could be their breakthrough album. Take a backwood spliff and inhale the therapeutic smoke of this loose leaf roll up and listen to their discographic coup de maître, Motherlode, and try to tell us we’re wrong.
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