Plumbiferous Media

Múm is an exper­i­men­tal group from Ice­land whose pre­vi­ous work has been marked by a strong elec­tronic influ­ence. Since their for­ma­tion in 1997, they’ve released six albums. Their newest album, Sing Along to Songs You Don’t Know, is var­ied enough in its exper­i­men­ta­tion that it should by all rights be at least inter­est­ing, but it man­ages to fall short.

One of the largest prob­lems with Sing Along to Songs You Don’t Know is the instru­men­tal deci­sions. While much of Sing Along to Songs You Don’t Know uses a stan­dard of gui­tar, strings, and pure synth, múm has also decided that that arrange­ment lacks diver­sity (and it does). But in order to make the instru­men­tals more inter­est­ing, the band relies heav­ily on effects and dis­tor­tion as well as odd (and most likely syn­the­sized) per­cus­sive sounds such as those of “Sing Along” or the spring­ing sound of “Proph­e­sies & Reversed Mem­o­ries.” Occa­sion­ally the band even takes this exper­i­men­ta­tion slightly fur­ther: “The Smell of Today Is Sweet Like Breast­milk in the Wind,” as an exam­ple, uses elec­tronic per­cus­sion that sounds only slightly bet­ter than some­one play­ing with the per­cus­sion patch on a cheap key­board. While múm clearly knew it needed exper­i­men­ta­tion to keep the album alive, it also clearly did not know how exactly it should experiment.

The vocals of Sing Along to Songs You Don’t Know aren’t bad. They sim­ply fail to hold the inter­est of the lis­tener for the entirety of the album. Múm’s ten­dency towards muted vocals would be entirely for­giv­able if it cre­ated a stronger con­nec­tion with the music or improved the album as a whole. Instead, it results in the vocals falling into a har­mo­nious but repet­i­tive pat­tern early in the album and never leav­ing it. Pushed below the elec­tronic effects and instru­men­tal odd­i­ties which fill Sing Along to Songs You Don’t Know, the vocals are never notable past their pres­ence as yet another sound on an often clut­tered and rarely inter­est­ing album.

Sing Along to Songs You Don’t Know cer­tainly suf­fers lyri­cally from the mediocre vocal pres­ence on the album. How­ever, the lyrics don’t need any help what­so­ever to be the worst part of the album. Obvi­ously meant to be play­ful, they instead come off as laugh­able, fur­ther decreas­ing any hold­ing power the album might have had. After its begin­ning with “If I Were a Fish,” which con­tains such amaz­ing lines as “If I were a fish / And you were a seashell / Would you marry me any­way? / Would you have my babies?” the album moves straight into the unset­tling (if some­what hilar­i­ous) sec­tion from “Sing Along: “You are so beau­ti­ful to us / We want to lock you in a house / We want to beat you with a spoon / We want to make you sing along / To songs you don’t know.” The lyrics take a slight break from mak­ing no sense what­so­ever on “A River Don’t Stop to Breathe,” where they’re a fairly well-used part of the track - but that’s an iso­lated inci­dent. The lyrics only get worse from there, to the point where the quasi-word “Hul­la­bal­la­balú” mas­quer­ades as a line - and not well.

Although the lyrics put the rest of the album to shame in this regard, Sing Along to Songs You Don’t Know is often overly sim­plis­tic. And while the music was clearly meant to fit well with the lyrics, imi­tat­ing in sound the images the phrases pro­vide, doing so is not par­tic­u­larly ben­e­fi­cial to the album when the lyri­cal con­tent is made up of inter-species rela­tion­ships and non­sense words. Of course, when the lyrics turn from per­turb­ing to dull, the music does as well, leav­ing many tracks, espe­cially those towards the end of the album, unin­ter­est­ing even to the point of being forgettable.

Sing Along to Songs You Don’t Know shows some promise. “A River Don’t Stop to Breathe,” though not per­fect, is inter­est­ing not only har­mon­i­cally and melod­i­cally, but also in instru­men­ta­tion. Later, “Kay-Ray-Ku-Ku-Ko-Kex,” despite its healthy use of non-words, pro­vides a much needed point of diver­sity on the album in addi­tion to using inter­est­ing chord pro­gres­sions and har­monies. But for the most part, Sing Along to Songs You Don’t Know is by no means a suc­cess­ful album. The vocals are decent, but lack diver­sity, the instru­men­tals range widely from good to bad, and the lyrics are sim­ply dis­as­trous. As for the music as a whole, it passes briefly through inter­est­ing on its merry way to mediocre and beyond.

This post is tagged 20-29, múm