MÚM – go go smear the poison ivy

(CD, fat cat)

After all these years, the twists, bends and forks in the road, the long walks home, up and down the hills and through the woods, the urban city centres and the various parts of the word, this band is still keen on walking on in its own mysterious pace. The main thing that has changed, but ever so slowly, is that the band is becoming more and more enigmatic. Múm are a band opting to lead the listener onto wrong trails. Never with malificious reasons or out of spite, but just so. Because it happens. They change between codes that have otherwise been firmly established and agreed upon by the leading parts of the pop-reception, and use them in new connections and new connotations. More than that, they fuse them, they make opposites go into the same box and bend and shape those signifyers of genres and subgenres until they fit, whatever their masterplan is.

This bridging of gaps and bending of straight lines is all over the record, mainly to be heard in the ever twisting and changing balance between electronic and homespun parts. I know, these things are no opposites and with all the digital tools and software there is really no difference between them anymore. Digital and analogue, big studio and home studio, songwriter or improviser, the boundaries have been blurred into one big pond of shades of grey. The magical thing with the songs of Múm is though, that the differences between these signifyers are still fully recognizable but these various parts are nevertheless closely connected. Take for instance the song, which also the first single, “they made frogs smoke till they exploded” with its fitting childlike melody and glockenspiel it also has parts that sound like electronic minimalism and some that sound like straight forward US indie pop. Even more so in the breakbeat versus nursery song versus shoegazer melody song "Dancing behind my eyelids." And where with other bands these stand out and clash onto each other, with Múm they sound like a big whole block of song. Even the noisy end of that song fits. It is a sort of mystery, but at least it proofs that the magic of the art of songwriting and arrangement still counts more than a billion bits and a hundred gigabyte can do.

This mechanism of fusing elements goes through the record in a lot of other connections as well, and discovering them is one of the most rewarding parts of repeated listening. For instance, the structural side of songwriting balances avantgarde composition and folk songs, even kid’s songs. The arrangements combine electronics, kid’s toys or fleamarket instruments, basic instrumentation, string sections and what else comes in handy. And so on, big things, small things, bigger things and smaller things. They together form a network of connotations and meanings, mostly in the mind of the listener – if that isn’t to phenomenological for you – and add reward upon reward on the listener. And I think they demand this kind of reception. It won’t do to just file them between Animal Collective and Sigur Ros, even though there is some truth to that, it is also plain lazy.

Maybe the best metaphor you can find for these songs is childplay. The intuitive way kids are able to make up games that make sense (to them), with ever changing rules, preconceptions and fixed places and rituals but also with a constant influx of new actions and reasons, where most mysteriously other kids are able to join in right away, having and spreading joy and glee, until the holiday afternoon has gone by much too quickly once again. Múm refer to children and child play all over the record, not only in songtitles and in musical citations, from children’s choir, field recordings to the singing, but also in their attitude towards things and issues. The latter spreads this massive amount of indifference to the grown up world’s cruelties and the effortlessness of meeting ever new day that makes up a lot of the nostalgia around childhood. Even ballads like “Moon Pulls” have this feeling of gentleness and ease.

It is our duty as grown ups to retain these times and places of freedom for our kids and ourselves. Maybe this record will remind a lot of people of this feeling and then make them long for it, so they’ll act upon it. In this respect this record works even better than “endless summer” by Fennesz, mainly because a lovely song always helps; and that is a fact.