Mum Sing Along to Songs You Don't KNow. A leak. Evil evil leaks abound. This is the first listen. Starts off with tinkles, twinkles, organic twiddlings on obscurities. Lovely. I do love Mum so much. This is starting off so grandly. A singer-songwriter thing about fish and seashells and other things absurd and not quite as interesting as they imagine but it is child like and innocent and dreamy and escapist and proud of not being from around here. Mum are alien to the world I live in. A world with people with geometric hairstyles they haven't altered in decades, where novelty is looked upon with skepticism not because of age but due to an unswerving conservatism of taste, you can't go wrong with being boring. It is why Mum would alienate all of my co-workers. I love this song as an opening song, it's almost a country song. Icelandic country. I wonder if this album was made before their country went into receivership? Are there political songs here? It sounds like they've been loving themselves some Seabear in the off season. Truly, we should all be loving us some Seabear and Sin Fang Bous, really. The songs are short. They were mainly short on the last album as well. They've become this loose hippy collective now, more Gorky's than Autechre. Will they ever go back to the electronic foundation? Maybe on the next one. Second song now. Sing Along and it is another slowie. More of the organic meanderings, the collective vocalisations, or is it but two of them? A male and a female, percussion muffling the ambience, guitars, it is almost conventional sounding. It sounds a symphony of sounds, noises, twitters of the heart, flashes of the mind, some primitivisms splashed around in a rock polisher. I love it. None of their albums have been repeats of the previous records. I guess the 2nd and 3rd were not so different but even then the third evidenced a move towards song based music. I've recently discovered the icelandic version of Finally We Are No One and I enjoy it more than the English version perhaps because it is that her helium pitched vocals are an evolutionary adaptation to rendering the icelandic language musically? I don't know. It's more whispers than coos in the native tongue. This was a bit Efterklang but they wisely left off the viking choirs. Although the press release I've just glossed over has ominous mentions of arrangements for choirs within. Oh dear. What is the appeal of a choir in pop music? These are tiny songs. They don't need big big ugly choirs to muddy the waters. The outro now, almost a capella, voice and scrapes, glass harmoniums or rivers of lead. Third song, it is jaunty, jug band-esque, country-ish, pretty voices-ful. It's a monument to progress circa 1923. When the great global warming occurs it will be Reykjavik that will cease to exist, Mum are doomed, and soon. It's average elevation is but 16m. Some silly hearts claim the ocean will rise 100m by the end of this century and most probably this will occur overnight, one fateful night when the moon rages and the sun sleeps. Mum will be in their plush carpeted studio one day recording another delicate record of fairy mushroom folk and suddenly when they step outside their front door they shall find the middle of the Atlantic. It will be tragic. All of their geothermal goodness will not be of any benefit when the warming comes. Obama has tried to stop it with his ridiculous cap and trade program but they've given away most of the emissions permits only to push off into the future the cuts. But if you don't think this will affect the average American by pushing unproven alternative energy sources then you are mistaken. Next track, number four, it's not jug band esque, it is baroque, folk, spare and fragile, pretty female voices and a countdown memorial beat. A metaphor for the impending doom faced by humanity in the face of the scourge of CO2? Possibly. Xylophones are terrifying. The problem with windmills is that it isn't always windy. Unless you plan on building redundancy into the system(this is why windmill power is so expensive) then you can't guarantee a steady source of electricity. So imagine you want to listen to the fabulous new Mum album and you plug in your hi-fi and play your vintage vinyl copy on your turntable from 1973 with its inefficient vacuum tubes and capacitors and you open the window to find a dearth of gentle breezes coming over the hill well unless you can call Mum up on your hand crank two way radio and ask them for an impromptu performance in your living room you are out of luck. It's a bit like using natural gas to make ethanol to power motor cars. Why not just use natural gas? I don't know. The natural gas lobby is not as powerful as big corn. Next song. Pounding on five gallon buckets, pounding on glass carafes, strings and distant voices. Are these the choral arrangements? I can live with these choral arrangements. It's an odd song. It's not such a great song. The words are an impediment, luckily they aren't proud of their poetry, I don't have a handwritten copy of the poetry and the voices are lounging at the back of the mix. This isn't so bad. Is this Balearic? What is Balearic exactly? How come everything that is praised on I Love Music is usually absolutely horrid? There is always a consensus among the tastemakers there and normally the consensus resolves only rubbish more clearly. Strange things. Mum are barely alive in the collective consciousness on I Love Music. Who knows why? The Smell of Today is Sweet Like Breastmilk in the Wind. Nice. This week we had infomercials on impartial media for Government funded healthcare. Globovision is our last hope. How exactly expanding government healthcare from covering only the elderly and infirm to covering everyone is meant to make healthcare less expensive is a mystery. It all boils down to the fact that the increase in Medicare spending has been less than the increase in private insurance expenditures since the mid-90s. But the government doesn't act according to market forces and in a strange reverse private care is subsidising government care for when the government decide to reduce payments to providers that reduction is inevitably retrieved from privately funded patient care. Who will reimburse the system's shortfalls when there is not an alternative to government care? I don't know. My aunt was 68, she developed lymph node cancer, she lived in Canada, they sent her home from the hospital to die, without any treatment whatsoever. Why? Because government care is run by statistics, statistics indicate that treatment for cancer for older patients is rarely effective. Care was denied. This is how costs are reduced. It is defensible in a strictly Benthamite social justice analysis, the old contribute less to overall GDP and consume more medical resources so it makes more sense to subsidise the care of working age populations but it's dreadful to think about if you are my Aunt. But whatever, it will be free healthcare and let's not worry about the distorting effect on demand when you eliminate the obstacle of price. Whatever, again. Next song, Hullabullabalu, with strange accents and it's a warped signature of loveliness and contemplation. It feels soothing and disorienting at once. Are they now a jam band? Do they sit in a room and start chanting meaninglessness and then take some more drugs and inhale the breastmilk on the wind and come up with these things? It is very Incredible String Band-esque. I am all about things being -esque this morning. I am on a low this Sunday morning. Summer is missing. I don't mind. I'd prefer the mercury staying beneath 90 degrees for all eternity. My optimum temperature is about 66 degrees. It could be 66 degrees 24/7, 365 and I would be exceedingly happy. But Al Gore says it will soon be 1000 degrees all of the time. Frightening times. Rich world problems are a laugh. This song is very pretty. Do little boys sit beneath windows outside of Mum practice spaces and have sketchpads where they wrestle with the profundities of songs with titles such as Blow Your Nose with trumpets that sound like trouser zippers, do they paint Chagall horses of freedom and other messages of Jewish folklore and think perhaps the lost tribe of Israel found root in all of the mountains of Iceland and in the depths Jokulsalron? In the ears of gnomes that hold up the construction of buildings while experts are called in to maintain a balance between the gnomic ecosystem and economic prosperity in Iceland. Who knows. That was spare, twinkles, strings and voices. Nice. I love Mum. I should apologize to them for my inexpert analysis of the issues that are leading the USA over a precipice. Now more nonsense. This is the still the first time I am listening to the album. I refrained from listening all week long. Such discipline. I listened to Napoleon instead and The Ballet. The Ballet are like a gay Baskervilles. Are the Baskervilles gay? I don't know. Could be. Am I? Could be. I am sexually inert. Another nonsense title. Mum are no longer an electronic band. Why not? They haven't been since Finally We Are No One. Summer Make Good was a goth record and now they make cookies filled with fluffy pop songs. There are dozens of them in the band, they are all equally important, egalitarianism is the enemy of pop bands. They have people in to play thumb piano and mouth organ and these are surely virtuosos of their craft. Michael Jackson could have been a Mum fan. I was feeling melancholic over Michael Jackson's death this week. It is hard to think of anyone who could have that sort of global impact these days. Perhaps it is because when people looked at Michael Jackson they knew they were spying in on a virtuoso? You could never dream to dance like Michael Jackson, you couldn't sing like him, you could never be more of an eccentric oddball than he was without it seeming like a pose to garner attention. He seemed genuinely disturbed. Imagine anyone looking at Ben Gibbard and thinking "God I could never be that whiny and uninteresting!". It doesn't happen. We are surrounded by mediocrity from the President to film to music to journalism to athletics (where have you gone Purvis Short?). It is a depressing time. There is an essay on ALdaily discussing the demise of beauty as an aspired to ideal. It is a lament for an age where people strive towards degeneracy and vapidness. Asher Roth is the nadir? Probably not. This sounds sissy, his voice is a bit Gibbardly. Maybe Mum are huge fans of the colossus of mediocrity Ben Gibbard. Strings and twinkles, it is an effective formula. When does this album offcially see the light of day? This has the feel of a winter record, a recession record, a record to wallow in the miseries of capitalism's failure in. Oh Karl Marx your day has come! Demography has killed the bourgeoisie. Pretty things. I have a cell phone now. My first ever. Did you want to call me? I could post my number on here. I haven't received a single call this week. This is why I don't need a cell phone. I am a horrible person that no one wishes to be in contact with. Look at how I have disparaged Mum's achievement with all of my deranged neoliberal expatiations on health care and the environment. I am a dreadful dreadful prince of Christmas. Last song. Piano and soft voices. Space. The air is free in Iceland, it is all we have left, we are all Icelanders here, our homes will be owned by banks from Latvia and Javier Solona and the USA is in the final of an international Futbol contest that no one seems to care about. The end is near. Listen to Mum, it will enhance your sadness and being sad means being alive.