Múm – Sing Along to Songs You Don’t Know

Several years ago I over wintered in Lausanne in Switzerland, living in an old military building high above the city. The closing in of December brought dense weather fronts that sat in the streets for weeks on end; dulled, the inclined roofs lay under heavy air; the mountains nothing but clamorous shrouds, massive rumours; and Lake Geneva, cloaked in fog, became like the dead anechoic heart of Europe. In a box room, the walls of which were so cold it made your wrists ache to touch, I would fall asleep to Múm’s Finally We Are No One - its warm liquid lullabies were the soundtrack to my dreams.

It’s odd to think how much has changed since then; and that through successive albums (and multiple line up changes) how that strange, liquid sound has nearly entirely leached away, to leave ”“ what? The current Múm sound is ostensibly now much more in line with the current crop of wide-grin Scandinavian acts. They fair skip along”¦ In my fuddled state I can’t quite decide if Mum were precursors to this scene or have somehow become assimilated into it and moulded their sound accordingly. Was this always in the background ”“ the framework beneath that shimmering otherworldly layer?

‘Prophecies and Reversed Memories’ is a kind of signature track for Sing Along to Songs You Don’t Know, the bands first recording for Morr Music since the 2001 mini album Please Smile My Noise Bleed. It features a galloping drum pattern, a glockenspiel (always a glockenspiel!) multi-layered harmonies, a desiccated banjo, a simply synth figure and, at times, I feel like I’m chewing on the tweeness. The lyrics are about the eternal return (‘you’ve dreamt this all before’), and it does feel pre-packaged somehow, as if this were the new Mum formula ”“ wash, rinse, repeat. ‘The Smell of Today is Sweet Like Breastmilk’ is precisely that. And that title. Christ.

‘A River Don’t Stop to Breathe’ shows another way however. Built around the same instruments, the track (despite the title) at least breathes a little. It’s beautifully backlit too, by a mournful string quartet that sounds like something John Wood ”“ Nick Drake’s arranger ”“ could have created. ‘Húllabbalabbalúú’ is equally gorgeous: a soothing nonsense rhyme that hovers over an uprush of brass. ‘The Last Shapes of Never’ is quietly stunning in its way too ”“ recorded in a 14th century house in Estonia, it’s no more than a simple guitar figure against the crackle of a fire. Such a simple statement reminds me of how over-adorned the rest of the record feels.

As ‘Ladies of the Century’ drips its last glacial drip of piano, I return to the beginning of the record sure that I’ve been overly harsh on the early tracks, yet each time that same feeling that it’s all too cute. I miss the darkness; the otherness that came before. With repeated listens it is apparent that that liquidity is still there, albeit tempered by the more overt use of acoustic instruments, it's just more of a spectre now, an echo. A good record then, not a great one. 73%

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