Múm: more geography and erotic songs

The maiden Download Chart with Westlife topping it last week and three Maroon 5 songs in the top 20, the current crop of the Official Chart - with the Top 3 of Nelly, Jo-Jo and Twista - makes anyone with taste feel like an outcast. All disrespect to mass consumption but not a disser per se or an armchair-anarchist, just an outsider to popular gullibility... Whilst a lot of beautiful music goes by unnoticed by the yobbots.

Múm’s ‘Dusk’s Log’ is a four-track offering [clocking in at 18:06 minutes] we have had in our ears for several weeks because it takes us places where the current pop crop can’t even imagine going. If music is an escapism from the crap we pretend to be l-i-f-e, we can’t find it in the music that is flogged by the music biz’ Big Bros. They surely can stumble upon something worthwhile but corrupt it soon enough to fit the only mould they know how to market.

The combo - two guys (Gunnar Örn Tynes and Örvar óreyjarson Smárason) and two classically trained twin sisters (Kristín Anna and Gyda Valtysdóttir) - present four tracks that float through the galaxies, elements, bounce off Icelandic vistas and are mates with water and air. ‘Kustrain’ opens quietly before picking up pace to erupt like a Krautrock in a Celtic land with some vaguely folkish sound. It is succeeded by stark beauty of ‘This Nothing Blowing in the Faraway’: a dreamy, ethereal and addictive exercise in minimalism.

Locality of our mental impressions by these two tracks could be Reykjavik and Ayers Rock, then ‘Will The Summer Make Good for all Our Sins’ [that provided the title to the mid-April released ‘Summer Make Good album] takes you to a Russian café in Paris, or precisely - above it, with someone like Alison Goldfrapp in the most seductively whispered bedding position. [Now, this is the sonic-induced-fantasy!]

‘Boots of Fog’ doesn’t stray far off, just across the border, and somewhat time, by recalling Berlin of the Weimer Republic when everything was possible and usually meshed together in one big bohemia. [Erm, that’s how we like to think of the period when Ice-queens ruled the stages and screens.] Anyway, being based between Reykjavik and Berlin…

Sometimes a quartet of cuts is worth far more than an album. Múm’s offering is worth a couple of ‘em.

8.3/10