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With kaleidoscopic curiosities and skittering twinkles, Yesterday Was Dramatic — Today Is OK is like walking around in a 9-year-old's head. The rhythms clamor and hum with youthful voltage, crayon multicolors and wonderland charm. Múm's peculiar instrumentation suggests the crackling of constellations or the skipping of a stone across water.
The beats of "Asleep on A Train" clank away like a train tumbling over tracks while a synthesized motif darts around like dragonfly thoughts. "I'm 9 Today" tiptoes through a nighttime landscape of subtle spectacles. "There Is A Number of Small Things," one of the album's many highlights, evokes the music boxes of childhood with a comforting twinkle before quieting down into an idle beat like a stick you rattle across fences as you walk down the street; a melody flickers into life and warmly accompanies a sweet selection of kids' voices, then eventually fades.
Yesterday Was Dramatic — Today Is OK avoids being twee or sentimental — the tracks have a beautiful nerve, an idiosyncratic brightness. Múm's extraordinary palette of electronic and acoustic instrumentation, as well as their sense of spaces and atmosphere, have produced an album of layered enchantments. The songs have contemplative moments, sparks and tremors, and generate their own momentum. Yesterday Was Dramatic — Today Is OK is a meticulous topiary of our childhood memories, of the pixels and circuits in the perpetual youth of our imagination.
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