Astral melodies and caressing clouds of warm, supportive chords spring
gingerly through this Icelandic quartet's songs; more than simply sketching childhood narratives, they endow them with
such blissful accents and cheeky twinkles as to drive listeners back to their own
picture book of memories, re-imagining what it must have been like to be so
young.
The fruit of a session Múm held in
2002 with the late
John Peel, these tracks do include some dazzling
shifts of focus. The
group oscillates throughout between their earlier work's intricate programming
and scattershot rhythms and the clattering cadences and languid grace of the
organic textures permeating such efforts as Finally
We Are No One. But still, the songs don't deviate all that much from the
basic
structure of their originals.
To be sure, pieces such as "Awake on a Train" find a new mirthful energy approached from the perspective of a live band, but if the
one-finger analog keyboard melodies and squelchy basslines make the songs prettier, they also make them more ordinary. On "The Ballad of the Broken String," the balance between the organic and artificial
elements maintains an underlying sturdiness, which keeps everything from
getting too satiny. In other
places, though, the group begins to move away from the poised, affecting
experiments of earlier efforts
to the sweeps of sound speckled with gauche naivety throughout Summer Make
Good.
In 2002, before all the sap had been sucked from the trunk of the
indie-electronica tree, this recording
session no doubt represented a genuinely relevant musical statement. At
this
point, however, these
sketches of childhood memories evoke only vague images, feelings that have
lost their luster, scenes
that have grown tiresome.
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