By Deuce

“Brother, you’ve been on my mind/ Oh, brother, we’ve changed over time/ So, brother, I’m keeping my eyes on you,” Cee-Lo Green, “Glockapella” Cee-Lo Green …Is The Soul Machine, 2004.

You may be forgiven for thinking that Oscar Flores and Thomas Flores are two of a kind. They are, after all, brothers. Approximately four years is just about all that separates these two. These are men who wear black. They’re men who don’t give the slightest hint of a smile when taking promo photos for their band, Mother Ghost. And, they’re men who like their metal hard, their grunge grungy, and are willing to punk any post-punk band and, most of all, display an amazing talent for hitting all these styles at once.

If not on the same song, they certainly have the knack for doing so on the same album. Just check out 2024’s Radio Fantasma, their second long player of the year, whose artwork is adorned in black and skulls alike, with shades of mauve and bared teeth just ripe for All Hallow’s Eve.

In an interview, they finish each other’s sentences. In the studio and in pre-production facilities, they seamlessly collaborate on the same tracks, building and sculpting them together. But most of all, they’re family, so the creative process between them becomes much more streamlined, visceral, and, on occasion, even overt.

“When you’re playing with not family, everything’s a suggestion,” Thomas pointed out. “When you’re trying to write songs with other people, you have to be nice about things you don’t like. You have to be like: ‘hmmm, can we try something a different way, maybe’? With Oscar I can just be like: ‘that is bad; I don’t like that. You should not do that’. We’ll maybe argue for a bit, but it’ll be fine. It’s not a big deal.”

Believe it or not, Mother Ghost used to be a five-piece band. According to Oscar, “The other guys left and we kept making music together.” As a duo, they’ve got different responsibilities in the group. Oscar, with a style that’s part banshee, part crooner, and part angry school teacher, mans the majority of the vocals. Trust, you’ll need to hear ‘em to believe ‘em. He’s also the go to guy on the electric guitars. Thomas holds down the low end with his electric bass. They’re both prone to jumping on any variety of their myriad drum machines for laying down the rhythm, and split time adding to the synths to layer the tracks.

“As far as the drum machine and the synths, that’s all Thomas,” Oscar indicated. “He’s basically the one that learned how to do all that—how to program—and he taught me. That happened in like, the last six or seven years.”

Partly by necessity and partly by desire, Thomas adapted his musicianship to a sundry of MPCs once the band was bereft of a drummer. Today, the programmed drums are an integral facet of the pair’s sound, particularly on Radio Fantasma. “Since we’ve been playing with the drum machine, I’d say for the most part, about 80 percent of the songs, we start with the beat and then we write over it,” Oscar explained. “And then, there’s a few songs that we’ll have the chords for on guitar and then we kind of translate that into the drum machine.”

“Sometimes we’ll have a fully structured-out song on the drum machine, where it has an intro, chorus, all the things, and then we’ll show it to the other person, and they’ll maybe have some other ideas too, and we’ll go from there,” Thomas added.

Earlier in the year the duo hooked up with Mind Mine, another Texas band bubbling up around Houston, and released the eponymous Mother Ghost vs. Mind Mine album, which features eight songs, including one in which Mother Ghost covers a Mind Mine song and vice versa. “We recorded our side at my house through a four-track cassette deck,” Thomas mentioned. “We wanted it to be…because we don’t get to do gnarly stuff like that, usually. We have all these clean-sounding, nice recordings and we were like, ‘let’s get really crazy with it’. We recorded it all on cassette, then sent those over to the Mind Mine guys and they put it all together.”

As far as the near future? “We’ll probably do another video at some point to put out on YouTube,” Oscar said.

“We’re throwing out a few ideas for videos,” Thomas clarified. “So, maybe one, possibly two, videos for this album. But we’ve been writing a lot. We’re maybe not playing as many shows, but we’re getting together and writing a lot as fast as we can.”

Continuing at that clip, a new album should be forthcoming soon.