Sing Along To Songs You Don't Know

We Say...

Review by Andrew Perry

One of Planet Earth's most intriguing musical adventures, Iceland's Múm have been through changes since they debuted with 2000’s analogue/digital-melding masterpiece, Yesterday was Dramatic, Today Is OK, where they spirited up a frightening/beautiful soundworld somewhere between Aphex Twin and Vashti Bunyan. The enchanting twin sisters, Kristín Anna and Gyde Valtysdóttir (the cover stars, coincidentally, of Belle & Sebastian’s Fold Your Hands, Child… album) have each departed, for New York and classical studies respectively.

This fifth album finds the residual boy duo of Gunnar Örn Tynes and Örvar Póreyjarson Smárason drawing more freely upon their auxiliary pool of Scandi weirdbeards, chirp-pixies and tinkerers, and striking upon another sound of otherness — this time, one that’s undeniably, unequivocally, irresistibly poppy, while still touched by unfathomable sonic logic, and coloured by instrumentation ancient and modern.

"If I were a bumblebee, and you were a bubble," coos Sigurlaug Gísladóttir, aka Mr. Silla, on opener "If I Were A Fish", "Would I drown in you anyway, in your soggy eyeball?" The song’s ukelele/pedal-steel twangings conjure up an Arctic take on Gram Parsons' Cosmic American Music. On "A River Don’t Stop To Breathe," Eiríkur Orri Ólafsson’s string arrangement brings a torrid classical edge to the Eno-ambient melodic drift, while "The Smell Of Today Is Sweet Like Breastmilk In The Wind" (yes, indeed!) underscores ageless folk song with tinpot old-skool rave beat programming.

Múm's ineffable fairy tale folk brings populist, near-Disney-ish magic at every turn. "Show Me" marries exquisite accordion wheezes with mindboggling glitschy tech-rhythm, while, at their very most accessible, "HúLLAbbALAbbALúú" soars. At times like this, the Múm collective, for all their frost-bitten strangeness, seem just a breath away from mass recognition.