Mourn - Ha, Ha, He.

Pitchfork 60

Try as they might, Mourn couldn’t help but show their age on their 2015 debut—prompted by classroom boredom, disdain for specific classmates and disdain for high school’s general social schematic, Mourn was clearly from the perspective of teenagers who really wish they weren’t. “They listen to music that doesn’t make you think about anything,” Carla Pérez Vas said of her peers, while she and Jazz Rodríguez Bueno gravitated to Sleater-Kinney, Sunny Day Real Estate, and PJ Harvey, thoughtful, strident acts who were in their prime before the duo were even born. Less than a year and a half later, Mourn’s age is a non-issue: they just sound like an indie rock band in 2016 that wishes it wasn’t.

The sonics are familiar, as is the trajectory. Ha, Ha, He joins the recent ranks of Yuck’s Glow & Behold and Eagulls’ Ullages, sophomore albums from similarly promising indie rock bands that didn’t build on their canonical indie rock influences or look towards other genres for inspiration. They simply dug a little bit deeper in the crates and made slight peripheral shifts. Mourn has claimed Throwing Muses as a major touchstone here, and there’s an unspoken affinity for some of the more ungainly anti-heroes of the alt-rock gold rush: Shudder to Think, Chavez, the second Sunny Day Real Estate album. Compared to its more jangly, plug-and-play predecessor, Ha, Ha, He. is all jagged physicality, throwing sharpened elbows and quick jabs.

Mourn are adept intimidators: the pummeling opening instrumental “Flee” suggests that Janet Weiss is the focus of their Sleater-Kinney hero worship, while “Evil Dead” nimbly shifts from stuttering riffs to an unsettling chorus of wraithlike chants. They sound confident here, not necessarily trying to adapt to their status as a band that can play festivals so much as exhibit their growth as pure musicians. The songwriting has become just as terse and flinty and it’s effective when Mourn engage with challenging subject matter—“I Am a Chicken” reads like a victim of assault rationalizing after the fact (“Drag me to your cave, grab my feet, I won’t complain...sorry to disappoint you”) while “Irrational Friend” and “Gertrudis, Get Through This!” cynically view love as transactional, a lopsided negotiation at best. It’s all brutal stuff, more so because they’re delivered no differently than anything else than what surrounds it—all of this is just part of the human condition to Mourn.

But for the most part, the unrelenting, grim inscrutability provides little beyond surface tension. Its two-tone album cover, P.J. Harvey-evoking title and Albini-style, hands-off recording establishes Ha, Ha, He. as a period piece—conjuring the grave austerity of mid-'90s post-punk but none of the invention. Just about anything that’s novel—jazz chording, serrated yells, tart harmonies—fails to truly flourish within the drab, flat production. Despite the jagged riffs and soberly intoned lyrics, there are few hooks; “Nobody is exempt from the unexpected,” “Little brother, sleeping in a puddle/intricate puzzle surrounds you” are typical of the lyrics that get reiterated enough to assume sort kind of portentous meaning, but exactly what is unclear.

On their debut, Mourn sang in English rather than their native tongue, with the valid belief that they would taken more seriously outside of Spain. While they were saddled by clumsy lyrics, it felt necessary to grade early songs like “Your Brain Is Made of Candy” and “Boys Are Cunts” on a curve: even if they were juvenile, they felt personal, inspired by an teenage vindictiveness that feels timeless and relatable. “Storyteller” and “President Bullshit” make the same points about the overly self-conscious, and thus fraudulent, nature of personal interactions, but their generality seems to be more a result of Mourn’s purposeful withholding rather than any kind of language limitation.

It’s possible to view Ha, Ha, He more kindly as a reflection of its already troubled history—though it was finished in 2015, Mourn claimed it was being “held hostage” by their Spanish label that also doubled as their managers (unfortunately, teenagers getting taken advantage of by their labels is also timeless). Maybe all of this explains the dour, dutiful nature of Ha, Ha, He, but that's what Mourn was probably going for anyways. They never wanted to be too young to feel this damn old.