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.