Happy 15th Anniversary to Mutemath’s eponymous debut album Mutemath, originally released January 19, 2006.
Have you ever felt like you were meant for more? Not that you are in a bad place, but there is just a drive to go somewhere new and do something different with people you haven’t met yet. It’s a specific type of unrest. New Orleans alt-rockers Mutemath have always carried it and it never glowed so brightly as on their eponymous debut.
Depending on where you start, the record was years in the making. Singer and keyboardist Paul Meany turned out a respectably progressive album with Christian band Earthsuit. After they called it quits in 2003, drummer Darren King started sending him musical ideas. Meany would sing something on them and send them back. Soon they added guitarist Greg Hill, and eventually, ex-Earthsuit bassist Roy Mitchell-Cárdenas. Their lab creations got them a deal with Warner Bros. for the Reset EP in 2004.
The EP was a combination of genres, a gumbo of rock, reggae, and jazz with samples and electric bleeps, distorted guitars, lascivious beats. The music was generating buzz, but when their CD hit shelves, it was tattooed with the Christian logo of Word Records. It rather diminished their cool factor. These Björk-shaped, Radiohead-soaked, Coldplay-adjacent Beck devotees sounded more like the second coming of The Police. They knew they didn’t belong next to labelmates Amy Grant and Randy Travis. Still, Warner wanted to offload them to their Christian sublabel.
The problem with this is, in many ways, Christian music is a ghetto. That industry is set up for the artists inside it to stay there. Although the members of the band met in church and practiced Christianity as a faith, they only wanted to be musicians, not ministers. When their label wouldn’t listen, they had to say it louder—with a lawsuit.
This was probably the harrowing battle that inspired “Typical,” a fist-pumping chunk of arena rock (“Because I know there's got to be another level / Somewhere closer to the other side / And I'm feeling like it's now or never / Can I break the spell of the typical?”). It was as if they put a megaphone up to that existential unrest and what thundered out was indubitably a hit.
Mutemath sued Warner Bros. Records for breach of contract and prevailed. As soon as the shackles were off, they pressed up the self-titled disc on their own label, Teleprompt Records. Their first long-player is jam-packed with stadium-sized hooks, gritty, eroded textures, and impassioned vocals that spar like a prizefighter. They had created a monster and their stage show was about to bring it to life.
Hill’s guitar work gave Mutemath its claws. Mitchell-Cárdenas on bass was the group’s soul, the heavy-bottomed skillet of the band. King was what we had always fantasized Animal from The Muppet Show would sound like, drumming with such ferocity he had to ceremonially duct tape his headphones on before each show. Meany was the focal point, usually sporting a spiky faux-hawk, always sounding like he might be Sting’s unacknowledged lovechild.
Audiences weren’t expecting such punk energy when Mutemath showed up in dapper slacks, vests, and skinny ties. Yet their shows routinely ended with them throwing guitars, smashing light bulbs, crowd-surfing, and stagediving. The show wasn’t complete until Meany did his famous keyboard handstand and came back for an encore of their signature instrumental “Reset.”
They were selling hundreds of CDs a night when their momentum lured Warner Bros. back to the table. This time they cut a deal guaranteed to take them where the first didn’t: directly to the mainstream.
The Warner version of Mutemath was re-released September 26, 2006. The band retooled standouts from Reset to freshen the reissue. With a major label budget, they could finally put some muscle behind “Typical” as a single. It paid off, charting #33 on Billboard’s Alternative Songs chart. Their inventive, Israel Anthem-directed clip, performed entirely in reverse, got a GRAMMY nod for Best Short Form Music Video. In total, their promotional efforts worked the album up to #17 on the Billboard Heatseekers chart.
Success was in the cards for Meany, Mitchell-Cárdenas, Hill, and King, but the record almost didn’t get made. They were in the middle of recording when Hurricane Katrina forced their evacuation to Nashville, Tennessee. The loss that all their families suffered informed compositions like “Picture,” “Without It,” and the hands-in-pockets interlude “After We Have Left Our Homes.” The latter bears the orphaned refrain, “When can we start over?” repeated like a mantra over a vacuum of untethered synths.
To keep moving forward, the band readied a video for their next single “Control.” To the band’s horror, they discovered another group had filmed a strikingly similar visual before Mutemath could release theirs. They didn’t want to look like they had stolen their own concept, so they shelved it. It went unreleased for years. If the guys know anything, it’s how to deal with disappointment. Much of the record concerns it.
“Plan B” for instance waxes poetic about best-laid plans going awry (“Mend it all, mend it all / All I've torn / All I've run to the ground / Broken down / Come mend it all”). The Synchronicity-reminiscent “Chaos” puts a similar sentiment through a spin cycle groove. Their angst is most effectively confronted on the meditative “Stall Out,” which crescendos into a starry, celestial climax (“I keep stalling out / I just can’t keep up / There’s alarming doubt / Am I good enough? / But you keep comin’ around / To convince me it’s still far from over”).
Mutemath’s alt-rock sound goes into overdrive on “Break The Same,” a lamentation about human frailty that shows off the band’s darker colors. Meany’s soft-spoken delivery bulks up as he unleashes a growled lyric during the guitar-encircled crest of the urgent track. The record isn’t all distress and brooding though. The romantic “Noticed” captures the ecstasy of new love, while the moderate tempo of “You Are Mine” pulls the band as close to sensuality as they can get.
Honestly, Mutemath is not a Christian album the way Monster’s Ball is not a porn flick. If parts of it get that job done for you, no one will judge, but that’s not really what the artists intended. They made music that spoke to a desire to shift, evolve and transform. It grabbed the unrest in their fans’ spirits and spurred them to move and shake loose. They inspired you without ever telling you they were doing it. And ironically, that may be the most Christian thing they’ve ever done.
LISTEN: