Album Review: Field of Love by Mozart's Sister

A few years ago, a tow-truck driver in Texas asked Caila Thompson-Hannant a seemingly simple question: "Do you wanna be big in music?" But the D.I.Y.-bred Montreal artist was taken aback. "I honestly could not answer him," she recalled in a recent interview . "It kinda shook me, and I thought a lot about it mostly because I wasn't sure exactly what I wanted." After playing in offbeat art-rock bands like Shapes and Sizes and Think About Life, Thompson-Hannant went solo as Mozart's Sister in 2011.

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Field of Love is Caila Thompson-Hannant's second full-length under the moniker Mozart's Sister. Her debut with Arbutus Records, it doubles down on the off-kilter electro-pop of her 2014 debut. In "Eternally Girl," the album's opening melodic line unfolds on mechanical bleeps that evoke movie spaceships of the pre-digital age. Thompson-Hannant's cherubic soprano enters with spare but glitchy accompaniment by melodic keys, electronic glugs, strings, and drum samples, each one at a time until the song kicks into full gear.

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As Mozart’s Sister, Caila Thompson-Hannant makes electropop that is elastic, colorful, and sugary. It is Laffy Taffy made manifest in song. That “elastic” quality feels especially pertinent in describing her vocals, which can change shape dramatically within seconds. One moment her voice is a full-throated bellow, the next a high-pitched coo redolent with sweetness.

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Montreal's Caila Thompson-Hannant -- best known as Mozart's Sister -- continues to bring her particular brand of exuberant, glistening pop on her latest LP, Field of Love. The release is more consistent in its sound and feel than 2014's Being, with all eight tracks sticking closer to each other, instead of lurching around a range of drastically different styles. That's both a blessing and a curse: it's more cohesive, but that commitment to something a touch more restrained results in slightly less excitement, too.

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