Fat-Cat Rec.
Múm : Go Go Smear The Poison Ivy (ICE,2007)****
It has been 3 years since Múm came up with a real new release. In the meantime some reissues of older work and some appearances of Múm's singer kept the memory on the group fresh.
Much of this album was recorded in an old school house, but one song dates back from a much earlier period.
Stylistically some of it is a fashionable folktronic pop expression as we know it from Múm. Somewhere I can also recognise some inspirations that might have derived directly from the playground in the schools. While children want to imagine and be in a comic-book coloured circus-like heaven to dream away in, there’s also a destructive selfish experimenting and exploring limits of expressions. With this, some forms of empathy can only learned from a teaching process from responsible and time-giving adults. A title like “they made frogs smoke till they exploded” reminds me of this. It is about that consciousness, not being kind to animals. In the video you can see the destructive vision coming back to the kids being restored in some time, after self-destructive exaggerations.
Just one part of the album is built up by playful and colourful musical toys and other arrangements which make a heavenly delightful pop music.
I hear almost something like a slowed down Bach theme on keyboards on “I little bit, sometimes”. Beautiful dual vocal harmonies here sound as close as if from one united couple’s creative mind.
Later on, the play game area matured, widening its intensions. Several of these new tracks sound more like a serious and descriptive, story-telling pop opera, something which defines another sound evolution for Mum. From these tracks I can firstly lift out the 6th track, “Marmalade Fires”, which also contains a beautiful string orchestra with harp arrangement. The 7th track, “Huubarbidoo”, however could easily be a miniature for a children television series. Also track 8, “Dancing behind my eyelids”, gives a new, modern vivid and rhythmic version of Mum, while “Guilty Rocks”, could be a first conclusion for this renewed sound, making ttheatre, pop, and fun go hand in hand. Also the last track, “Winter (What We Never Were After All)” sounds like a kind of pop-opera ending, dramatic and very filmic, with choir-like arrangements, a bit of brass, rhythmic evolution.
A serious new and convincing renewed launch of the group based upon the same, but further developed attractive sound they have built up over the years.
