Mourn: "Otitis"
Whatever you ascribe it to—osmosis, heredity, good ol’ black magic—there’s no denying that Mourn have an almost uncanny ability to channel a particular strain of 90s alt and indie rock: think early PJ Harvey, Slant Six, a more garagey Breeders. Not only does the group come from a pair of small, sleepy, middle-class towns some 30 minutes north of Barcelona—hardly a rock’n’roll hotbed—but frontwomen Jazz Rodríguez Bueno and Carla Pérez Vas and drummer Antonio Postius Echeverría are all just 18 years old. Bassist Leia Rodríguez Bueno, Jazz’s younger sister, is just 15. True, Jazz and Leia’s father is a career rock musician, but the band’s scrappy, urgent sound stems directly from the kinds of punk and indie that are nowhere to be found in his project, the New Raemon.
But why worry where they got it from, when what they do with it is so engaging? “Otitis”, the latest single from their just-released Captured Tracks debut, is a perfect example of what they do so well. (Like the rest of the album, it was recorded live in the studio, with minimal overdubbing.) Jazz and Carla’s voices rise in fall in unison, both with each other and with their twinned guitar lines; Antonio lays into his drum kit like he’d like to knock it over, while Leia remains rock-steady, unshakable. There’s a hint of Homestead jangle in the way their chords ring, and an even fainter hint of the White Stripes in their bent blue notes. The lyrics hint at frustrations nonspecific—”a burning ball inside its hole”—but the song’s structured like a mantra for an uphill climb, huffing and puffing ’til there’s nothing but blue skies and catharsis as far as the eye can see.
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