EUREKA

An announcer's voice begins Mother Mother's third album, Eureka, with the words, "Commonplace things seem to have great significance," after which a female voice cheerily calls out, "Hi!" It's a good introduction to another collection of Ryan Guldemond's quirky songs, on which he is accompanied by his sister Molly and Jasmin Parkin. On "The Stand," the album's first single, Guldemond is posed silly musical questions by the women and provides silly musical answers. ("Tell me your weakness." "Oh, I keep it a secret." "Oh, come on, just one vice." "Okay, it's vodka on ice.") It suggests the absurdist interaction of the singers in the B-52's, except that the music is Beatlesque mid-`60s pop/rock and Guldemond sounds more like Jack White than Fred Schneider. His odd sense of humor extends to the song's coda, on which he repeatedly clips the "F" word from a line ("Everyone's f***ed, and they don't even know"), then playfully says it anyway, and chuckles. So what if that send-up of the fig-leaf censorship rules will earn the album an "explicit lyrics" listing? Guldemond and his friends are intent on amusing themselves here, and more often than not, they succeed in entertaining their listeners as well. ~ William Ruhlmann