Should Múm be burned at the stake for witchcraft? Probably not, it isn't exactly legal. Besides they're not the Wicked Witch Of The West types more the kind of enchanted woodland folk that Enid Blyton would have loved to document. Either way, They certainly had Brighton under a spell at the Concorde 2.
Múm lure their audience in with layers of delicate beauty carefully washed together with guitars, drums, cellos, violins, trumpets and all manner of smaller, less definable instruments. Each song is rich, dense and saturated with melody yet intermittently the underlying drone - ever present but usually humming away in the background - swells up and encompasses all. These huge torrents of noise ride in on waves of subtle percussion, carrying the listener in with them and breaking over ear-shattering bass kicks. The resulting wreckage gradually settles and the girls a cappella rise to the surface, briefly buoying the audience and splashing them with playful trills of bleeping electronica. Then they're dragged back under a trip-hop drum line and finally resuscitated by the awkward rhythms of a restarted heart and the kind of lurching dance mentality that Metronomy share.
All the while this Icelandic band sweep through genres far more frantically than their serene image would have you believe. Fronted by two girls, one clutching a melodica tightly to her breast and the other draped in a patchwork tablecloth. They would scream twee if it was possible for them to utter something so inharmonious and if they didn't morph their string drenched folk into Stereolab's loop based electro-funk so nonchalantly. Their song structures are yet another facet that can be safely filed under 'unorthodox'. Catchy phrases that approach from the horizon and sound as if they should be the chorus sink without a trace never to reappear whilst titanic breakdowns occur frequently. They succeed in keeping the audience on their toes, always threatening to carry them out of their depth but never seriously enough to replace the thrill of drifting in experimentation with the fear of drowning in inaccessibility.
Even if the sea side locale and ultramarine lights fail to affect you it's hard not to submerge yourself in their sound. Better still, imagine you're trying to float on your back. Remain too stiff and it won't work, it's much easier to relax, tilt your head back and bob along in Múm's wake.
Múm - Blessed Brambles on Spotify.
Photo by Sam Hiscox, you can see more of his photography as he documents Múm's tour on their tour blog.
Related Posts:
Metronomy - Live
Metronomy - Nights Out (Album)
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment