Indie- and art-flavored Mothers plays Double Door

Kristine Leschper studied visual art at the University of Georgia in Athens, but it’s music that’s kept her and her band Mothers on the road for the last six months – first with fellow Athens indie art-rock collective Of Montreal, then on its first headlining shows.

So how did a shy visual artist from Noonan, Ga., end up fronting a rock band that stirs comparisons to Joanna Newsom, Angel Olsen and Throwing Muses’ Kristen Hersh?

“The moment of truth was taking my first printmaking class,” Leschper says from her drummer’s parents’ house on the way to opening night in Orlando, Fla. “It’s this very time-consuming, old-school way of making art. You create a woodblock or a copper plate or a lithostone. You basically create this matrix that’s really heavy or hard to make. It’s process-driven – basically taking a sheet of paper and putting this matrix on it and running it over and over through a huge heavy machine. until you have hundreds of prints.

“It made me realized I liked being obsessed with things. It gave me this drive to work really hard and explore new ways of expression.”

She began playing the guitar she got in high school, writing her own songs and performing solo, which was nerve-wracking at first.

“I performed a little in high school and I’d gotten burned by those experiences. I’d played acoustic shows at coffee shops and had a really bad time doing it and I think that’s why it took so long. I would just break down and couldn’t handle people looking at me,” she explains.

In the creative hub of Athens, she became more comfortable in her own skin – which helped her develop on stage.

“When I was first playing acoustic shows in high school I was unhappy, didn’t like where I lived, didn’t have friends. I was a teenager. I was angsty. Moving to Athens helped me figure out more about myself,” she says.

She recruited a backing band of other solo and visual artists – Mothers – who helped flesh out the songs on the debut album, “When You Walk a Long Distance You Are Tired,” which will be released Feb. 25.

Its live show wooed indie tastemakers like the music blog Brooklyn Vegan at last year’s CMJ Festival. Mothers is set to play SXSW in March.

The album presents a creative mix of psychedelic folk and indie rock with Leschper’s unusual Southern croon at the forefront. A song can switch gears from quietly plucked strings to bombastic, distorted rock without jarring the listener. It’s one of the best early releases this year.

Leschper’s come a long way from the shy girl who penned these songs though. Last January she created a multimedia performance art piece for the band that caught the attention of Of Montreal’s Kevin Barnes, who brings wild visual theatrics to his band’s live shows.

“That’s a big part of the reason we were able to go on the Of Montreal tour,” she says.

A combination of solo and full-band live music, spoken word, projection, characters, costuming and an installation she put up between 2 and 7 a.m. the night before the show, the practically unrehearsed performance went off without a hitch.

“Kevin saw we were trying to make something that wasn’t just a rock band,” says Leschper. “We’re trying not to be stuck in this mindset of a rock band or an indie rock band or a punk band, but to make things we’re proud of and not stick to one genre.”

This story was originally published January 14, 2016 at 4:05 PM with the headline "Indie- and art-flavored Mothers plays Double Door."