Múm, Sing Along To Songs You Don’t Know

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 Ã-rn Tynes and Ã-rvar 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 Ôlafsson'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.