The first song, named the same as the album, is a decent enough album-opener. Hell, the only reason I found out about it was due to some Facebook post. The new album Babel has been released, and as far as I know there has been very little press coverage regarding it.
If this was any indication of what the new album was to be like, it would be correct: long and monotonous. The video released with “I Will Wait” featured a road, and only that. M&S have been quiet lately, and it wasn’t until early July of 2012 that the people who actually cared got a new single from the band, entitled “I Will Wait”. The playtime the singles received shot Mumford and Sons into the mainstream, gaining fans practically overnight. This was something new for the radio, which generally only got as diverse as a poppy Coldplay single. Mumford & Sons burst onto the scene in 2009 with the singles “The Cave” and “Little Lion Man” from their album Sigh No More. With every crescendo of catgut and steel, their lack of nuance becomes wearing.Review Summary: Is the sophomore slump just superstition? Sadly (for some), in Mumford & Sons' case it isn't. But with rustic indie in general, and here in particular, great emotion is mostly conveyed by strumming very fast or fiddling very hard it's the musical equivalent of shouting at foreigners and simpletons. Given heft by Biblical references and lifts from novels, Marcus Mumford's internal weather is intriguing, given his past relationship with Marling and, now, marriage to actor Carey Mulligan, and this second album is less over-weeningly jolly than the first, with incursions of electric guitar and drums.īabel – track and album – aims to rouse. Folk is a malleable resource, and here it is stripped of all politics or witness-bearing, becoming an exercise in romantic exegesis for nice men with mandolins. You would happily knit your own ale with them.įor all these brownie points, Babel remains an anodyne record, lacking the shivery authority of Laura Marling's work. You cannot fault their love for playing out-of-the-way places, their imperative to keep things human-sized and people-powered or their wariness of a rapacious and crass mainstream. Mumford & Sons have rarely been off tour, a laudable dedication to the troubadour's craft which has extended to hosting their own festivals, Gentlemen of the Road.
It's a sound practice that goes against the grain of most artist management nowadays, which tends to guard new intellectual property closely.
Many of these songs – like live favourite Lover of the Light, the banjo-powered lay hymn Whispers in the Dark or the more intriguingly tormented Lover's Eyes – have existed for over 18 months, beaten into studio shape by audience response. SNM producer Markus Dravs (Arcade Fire, Coldplay) reprises his previous role of making the Mumfords sound like a cross between the stomp and clamour of Arcade Fire and Coldplay's brow-furrowed yearning. Babel is the logical and effective successor to Sigh No More an emotive, faintly God-fearing clutch of songs. M&S (and it is an unfortunate abbreviation) are not a band who might suddenly recant their acoustic ways and seek out some dubstep fettling. In America, roots music is a huge force that rivals the pop economy the US clasped this wholesome foursome in a particularly enthusiastic bear-hug, out of which popped two Grammy nominations.Īs a result, the follow-up album bears a heavy yoke of expectation, one lightened with the sure bet of M&S's constancy. And that one of their number – Mumford & Sons – would, by 2012, have sold over 5m copies of their debut album, Sigh No More, snared a Brit, and become, after Adele, the UK's must-have new musical export. That might help explain why Mumford & Sons have become one of the beleaguered music industry's good news stories.Ĭertainly, few would have predicted back in 2006 that Mumford banjo player Winston Marshall's raggle-taggle folk night – Bosun's Locker – would give rise to a clutch of well-regarded artists like Johnny Flynn, Laura Marling and Noah and the Whale. W hich came first, the fashion for urban 20-year-olds to wear brogues and waistcoats or the success of rustic British pop? It's hard to tell, since a general brownness has been ubiquitous for the past half-decade in a period when British fashion and music have been cross-pollinating to the gain of both.
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