O My ♥, the latest full-length release by Vancouver’s Mother Mother, is a record I’ve been eagerly anticipating since 2007’s Touch Up, which is unabashedly one of my favorite albums of all time. I’m not exaggerating when I say that I could listen to every song on that album at least three times in a row, and that, however plebeian it may be, is the highest praise I can give to a record.

So, how does O My ♥ compare?

Pretty well, actually. Vocals are as good as ever, the harmonies well-crafted and ear-pleasing. The guitar work is great, bass starts excellent from the beginning of the record and never disappoints, the drumming style is varied and consistently very good, and the additional instrumentation (woodwinds, keys, cello, etc.) is placed well, giving its songs the individual charm that was so impressive on Touch Up.

The lyrics possess the kind of wit I’ve come to expect from the band, dealing smartly with typical song topics like love, longing, and loss in an atypical fashion, the songs framing their dialogue in often titular metaphors, like Ghosting’s tale of giving up after a failed relationship. (Or a ghost haunting someone.) Lines like Burning Pile’s “All my money been a long time spent/on my drugs/on my rent/on my saving philosophy/it goes one in the bank and the rest for me” possess both cadence and relatability, while Wrecking Ball and its repetition of “I am unruly in the stands/I am a rock on top of the sand/I am a fist amidst the hands/and I break it just because I can” is Limp Bizkit’s Break Stuff for the tight-jeaned, bespectacled English major shuffling his feet awkwardly at the back of the bar, one hand in his pocket and the other holding a beer. On the other palm, Hayloft relies heavily on lyrical repetition, but its tense, driving rhythm more than compensates, making it the best song from the album to do anything urgent to. (Driving a car, returning a video, bathing a horse, whatever)

Ultimately, though, I don’t like this album as much as Touch Up, for two reasons: one, not all of the songs are as jaw-droppingly excellent as they were on the aforementioned album. Miles is this record’s Polynesia, in that it captures the atmosphere of an exotic locale pretty effectively, but it continues at its loping pace for the full three minutes and sixteen seconds without ever really going anywhere, which is brilliant given the context of the song but boring given the context of the album. Likewise, Try to Change’s instrumentation is spacious and very well done, but its vocal harmonies are lacking in comparison to the rest of the album. The second reason is that there’s no counterpart on the record to Love and Truth, a song off of Touch Up featuring Debra-Jane Creelman in a prominent vocal role — of the three, I must say that I like her voice the best, and so her relegation to mostly harmonies on this album is disappointing.

However, said nitpicks only make their first album marginally superior to O My ♥, and the album is beautiful in its own right. I highly recommend letting it grow on you, because it will, as sure as fungus grows on the Tree Man.

Mother Mother playing at Lee's Palace, Toronto