Vinyl Diaries XXIV: Múm

Múm
Manning Bar
March 18, 2008

How I love the Icelanders. Those cute little vikings, playing their strange little games. Perhaps it's the vast gulf between us, spatially but also geographically, that intrigues.

After days spent on golden beaches, baking under blindingly blue skies, it makes a pleasant change to don some wings and rug up for the journey north, to a land of ice-green castles and eternal childhood... or so it can often seem.

Predictably Björk (while in Sugarcubes) was my first encounter with this land, a snow angel with a Cockney twist. Along the way I picked up a certain fondness for the electronic tinkerings of Múm, but as they drifted along on unsteady seas following their excellent debut Yesterday was Dramatic - Today is OK it was soon overshadowed by an adoration for the bombastic dramascapes of Sigur Rós.

In their wake, Múm seemed a tad anaemic, a little too indecisive and directionless. Their lack of sweeping gestures, unwillingness to unleash grand musical statements about the state of human existence, relegated them to a pleasant background, unambitious glitchy aural wallpaper to cook by.

Tonight, however, they peeled themselves of the wall and plopped themselves fairly and squarely in the middle of the room, adding a little shimmy for good measure. Their line-up change has clearly done them a world of good and we're all the richer for it. Late on stage due to "getting caught up in the traffic of life", they quickly settled us in for the ride, setting the scene with an icy wind across the frozen tundra.

With the arrival of Go Go Smear the Poison Ivy, not only do we have a line-up expanded to seven members, but what it's hard to call anything other than songs. In the past they seem to have worked in spaces, on scapes rather than journeys, moods rather than stories.

Electronics may be at the heart of the song writing and the general Múm experience, yet on stage it played but a bit part, subsumed by wave after wave of instrumentation - cello, violin, recorder, harmonica and even kazoo giving beautifully flawed flesh to the bass and drum skeleton that danced into being. And of course it wouln't have been Múm without plenty of the usual melodica mayhem.

I have a not-so-hidden soft spot for a bit of doom or gloom in my music, a weakness for a little nihilism with my glockenspiel, but I can see this new bounce in their step is doing Múm's music a world of good. The joyous 'Marmalade Fires' with its warm and fuzzy sweet nothings should be required listening for Architecture in Helsinki, a lesson in cheerful layering that manages not to descend into over-sugared, gratingly hyperactive inanity.

An extended 'Dancing Behind My Eyelids' was gloriously cheerful, a playful nod to Stereolab on its way to a three-way recorder duel breakdown. 'Blessed Brambles' was another uplifting treat, while the occasional Eastern European influence creeping in gave a welcome sense of them pushing into new directions and drawing us with them.

Of the older songs, it was heartening to hear 'Oh How the Boat Drifts' given some life, the twinned male/female vocals bringing it to a much more satisfying conclusion than the wispy coo of the Summer Make Good version.

The same reinvention lifted the two-song encore to delightful heights. 'The Ghosts you Draw on My Back' and that tingling final couplet: 'I hope tonight you will touch my hair/ And draw ghosts on my back' could have been the perfect slowburn ending for sending us out into the moonlit midnight, but the twitching electrowave clatter of 'Smell Memory' was more fitting for this newfound cheerfulness, the indescribably memorable synth line still skittering and jittering around my head, where it's bound to stay for days.

Vinyl Diaries XXIII: Iron & Wine

Iron & Wine
Manning Bar
March 11, 2008

Welly well, this one is bound to split the faithful. But they can't say they weren't warned...

When Shepherd's Dog spilt from the Iron & Wine crucible last year, it was not quite what many may have expected. Where previous experiments had delivered a hushed, delicate substance, salty, brittle and liable to dissolve under the weight of no more than our gaze, in its place we now found a malleable, multi-hued affair with a whole lot more bounce.

There were hints of this fuller sound on 2004's Our Endless Numbered Days, but the image that still came to mind when I thought of Iron & Wine was the bushy-bearded The Creek Drank The Cradle and its fragile, acoustic, front porch whispers. We were reminded tonight of the intimacy of these early songs, the husky hush over finger-plucked guitar, when Sam Beam and sister Sarah took to the stage for the hauntingly gorgeous 'Trapeze Swinger', its eloquent graffiti at the pearly gates a peek into a vivid past near-perfect. Sitting back-to-back with 'Jezebel', we are struck by the powerful forces that are absence and memory, and how well Beam paints with these themes.

At this point, for better or worse, things took a turn for the fuller. The band took a few songs to settle in, but once they did there was no denying they had found a groove. What's more complicated is deciding whether this groove was the right one. I expect there will be a bit of angst about the drumming, and the general direction in which it carried the show. The dub element gave Sam a fairly strong base from which he could branch out, opening up new spaces for jamming out a few ideas. It was a little unsettling to see this go as far as the Fozzie Bear pedal (wokka wokka), but when it clicked it carried us along quite well.

A niggling feeling I couldn't shake was a certain paint-by-numbers approach from the band at times, coming across like session musos out on a field-trip. There wasn't the same fire in the belly Sam clearly has, and Sarah was really the only other one who kept us believing that they meant it. So when working it was a treat, when not quite working it came across as a lite-dub Wilco.

The fuller arrangements worked really well with new songs such as 'Boy With A Coin' and the fantastically hewn 'House by the Sea', and even gave a nice kick to older works - 'On Your Wings' and 'Cinder and Smoke' revelling in their make-overs while retaining their low-key rhythmic genius.

Yet one also couldn't help but wish, at times, for a little more breathing space for Sam's more delicate pieces. 'Sodom, South Georgia' needed stripping right back, the beautiful bare bones on the album sadly over-dressed. And surely with a band this size, there was room for the occasional banjo outing? Oh well, minor quibbles. As the songs gained in instrumental richness, they lost a little in terms of having our breath taken away by these snatches of lyrics for which I fell in swoon with Iron & Wine.

When I first heard Sam's voice warble "Those band-aid children chased your dog away" over the edge of a gorgeous 'Sunset Soon Forgotten' precipice, I was swept off my feet and haven't turned back. Dig a little deeper and such turns appear all over the place, but are harder and harder to find as the music does more and more of our thinking for us.

So here I am again, facing the same dilemma posed by Jason Molina a little way back. I cherish these troubled gents in their nakedly exposed solo mode, and humour them well enough when coddled by a band. They're enjoying it, it's where their path has taken them, and the choice is to get used to it or miss out on those moments of magic they can still deliver.

Vinyl Diaries XXII: Beirut

Photo by obo-bobolina

Beirut
Manning Bar
March 5, 2008

This could have been an utter schemozzle. Shuffling onto stage lost in the midst of his eight-piece band, bedecked in a cartoonishly ill-fitting sportscoat, Zach Condon was looking more than a little ruffled, to put it politely. Watching his eyebrows try and find a horizontal as he finally located the microphone, one darting away just as the other was brought into check, it was as though Dylan Moran had taken his place and we were about to be treated to a stumbling run-through of Black Books: The Musical.

A couple of slugs from a silver hip flask - 'Jamesons, the only way to beat the jetlag' and a few mumbled nothings that made less than no sense and all did not bode well. Until...

'Nantes'. Condon the crooner shook the shabby Irish whiskey soaked 22-year-old by those over-fabricced shoulders (helped in no small measure by a fill-in drummer who seemed at times to be the only one holding the whole show together). While singing, Condon thankfully slid into some parallel universe, if not of sobriety at least of comprehensibility.

The twin-ukele urgency leading into 'Brandenburg' took us out of the Francophilic The Flying Club Cup and back to the Balkan whimsy of Gulag Orkestar, with the set travelling fairly neatly between the two with a spattering of pieces from the Lon Gisland EP.

While centring very much on Condon's rich, dreamy voice, it's the thoughtful instrumentation that makes Beirut that little bit special. It's all been done before, and pinches shamelessly from traditions with their own rich history that we're all a bit too short on time to thoroughly explore ourselves, but it's no less fun for it.

There is a risk of such rampant eclecticism and pilferring devolving into mere pastiche, unreconstructed gestures of overbearing irony and knowingness with a wink. But Condon skirts this danger with his unbridled enthusiasm, the collector's glee in the finer points of his obsession. Seeing these broad brushstrokes of influence all brought together on stage was a treat, witnessing the way such simple drum and bass patterns are so cleverly layered with violin, piano accordion and, of course, the brass.

Of such brass, there was no shortage. Condon took to the ukelele a couple of times, but it was the trumpet that got more of his attention. Most songs took advantage of the playing talent available, with neatly-layered combinations of trumpet, euphonium and baritone sax all adding their warmth.

Come to think of it, brass seems to be the new black. In the last couple of months no self-respecting artist/band has toured without a brass section - it's been used to fairly good effect by Sufjan Stevens, Arcade Fire, Bjork, and even Broken Social Scene. Sufjan is probably the only other act where it was quite as essential as it for Beirut. As with his show it's no mere adornment, but weaved into the very essence of the music. It gives it both its drive and its colour and it's nearly impossible to imagine it being left out.

The best thing about it tonight, for these brass-jaded ears, was the way it fizzed rather than honked, slid rather than popped. And the rather sexy baritone sax always makes me smile. Melding with the rest of the ideas floating around the stage, the brassy bits provided rungs by which to follow Condon on his merry, spiralling march.

Whether this march is ascending or descending I'm not quite sure - and I don't know if they are either. Perhaps its neither, and both; Escher writ musical.

Relaxing into this hot air balloon ride across continental Europe, vast green territories dotted with the occasional spire or lake, its a highly pleasurable journey. He might be drunk as a love-sick skunk, but Condon's charms are in the outpourings of his affection, for travel, for music, for life.

Those wondering whether Gulag Orkestar was a lucky strike by a precocious one-trick pony might these days need to reassess. Despite the affection I felt for mournful 'Mount Wroclai' and the nicely complete 'Elephant Gun', one moment right near the end of the first set stood out and gave plenty of hope.

This was 'Scenic World', which started its life on Gulag as a near-throwaway; two minutes of cheesiness slipping along on a lo-fi bossa beat. It was reborn on Lon Gisland, with an all but hidden keyed riff from the original passed on to the piano accordion, taking more of the spotlight. Tonight, however, it had been handed on to the violin, with glockenspiel in support. The sea-scouting, see-sawing trip was slowed to about two-thirds of the pace and all these beautiful, previously undiscovered crevices opened.

While I don't expect these crevices to be re-explored by Beirut - the eternally restless Condon unlikely to give his laurels such a resting - this reinvention did show that these are living works, breathing and growing gracefully and opening up new paths, rather than museum relics destined for the dustbin of musical history.

The Music Box: Chapter Sixty-One

Food! Emily finally had it, the secret to how one could get into and out of the music box without Crouch’s infernal machine.

She now knew how he was able to come and go on a whim, how he could put terror into the hearts of those who lived in the box, of Oscar and Bernard and Minerva and – she had to stop thinking about them, it was all too much.

Emily had known all along that there was no way she was ever going to get Crouch back in that chair, there was no way of tricking him that was going to have any chance of success. But this – this opened up a door of opportunity. Even if only the merest hint, it was still something to latch onto, it was the return of hope.

Her heart raced with excitement, but before she could double-check the last thing she had read – to make absolute certain that what she believed was true – the book burst into flame. Emily was still sitting and the book has been resting in her lap. In seconds it was a blazing ball and she had no choice but to push it from her, watching as it fell towards the sea. It hit the water with a hiss and plunged instantly from sight beneath the seething froth, just as Emily saw with horror that the flame had licked at Crouch’s suit, catching the end of the jacket and racing up towards her chest.

Without a second thought she followed the path of the book, tumbling through the air and crashing into the water below. For some time, Emily wondered why the water wasn’t colder. It dawned on her that shock had set in – she had only moments before she would feel the icy clutches of the sea’s frozen fingers drag her even further down. Emily forced open her tightly clenched eyes, desperately seeking a sign of where in the depths of the water she had finished. Shattered shards of light danced teasingly all around her, but she thought she could perceive the direction from which they seemed to be coming. But as she began kicking out, hoping she was heading up, Emily was sure she could see bubbles passing her, racing down to the floor below.

“Bubbles don’t drop!” a voice shouted in her head. “You’re going the wrong way!”

Struggling against the weight of Crouch’s heavy clothes – now unfeasibly heavy as they soaked up what seemed like every spare ounce of the sea – Emily felt the searing heat of lungs desperate for air. She kicked and kicked but could bear it no longer, feeling her chest ready to burst. She opened her mouth and sucked in, waiting for the choking torrent of water to fill her. But the crisp cool sensation in her throat was not water at all – she had somehow broken the surface and was drinking in the beautiful clean air.

Emily felt her body dragged away from the pier, drawn out towards the horizon, but the next sensation was of being drawn up and up and up, climbing a wall of water building high over the surface below. She watched in amazement as the shore came hurtling towards her, finally realising that it was she being thrust towards its edge. Emily careened down the front of the wave, twisting and tumbling all the way, losing all sense of direction and even where she started and finished, what was her and what belonged to the sea. She finally found herself tangled in a pile of slimy green seaweed as the wave receded.

Lying flat on her back, staring up at the darkening, heavy grey sky, swollen like bee-stung lips with an angry stormhead, her chest heaved with the precious life-giving act of breathing she has always simply taken for granted. It occurred to Emily that she had never been taught to swim.