Múm
Go Go Smear the Poison Ivy
(Fat Cat, 2007)

In Jonathan Lethem’s novel Motherless Brooklyn, Lionel Essrog, a wanna-be private eye with a debilitating case of Tourette’s, explains how the first time he heard Prince’s Kiss, he recognized his own compulsive tics in the music. “[Prince’s] guitar and voice twitching and throbbing within obsessively delineated bounds… the way he worried 45 minutes of variations out of a lone musical or verbal phrase is, as far as I know, the nearest thing in art to my condition.” It’s a remarkable connection, and one that makes you listen to Prince’s music with new ears and hear the oddness.

I’m pretty sure I don’t have Tourette’s, but there’s a whole genre of restless, clattering music that my brain responds to with a similar feeling of recognition. I feel it in the dizzying thumps of Aphex Twin, the spazzed-out swerves of Bogdan Raczynski, the aleatoric folk of the Books, and in the fidgeting transcendence of Icelandic group Múm. If rock ‘n’ roll is supposed to hit you in the gut, these artists hit me in my brain; if a good rock song is one idea said honestly, these artist’s songs are about having a hundred ideas and the stutter of trying to say them all at once.

Múm has always been more accessible than a lot of their glitchier peers. While their beats can sound like a handful of change chucked at a drum machine, and experimentalism is always in the forefront, the group has carved out a sound that’s Aphex Twin for children—constantly mutating, slightly menacing music swathed in the ambient glow of warm vocals and a generous pop sensibility. On their first two full-lengths, Yesterday Was Dramatic – Today Is OK and Finally We Are No One, they created skittering washes of sound that tickled at my brain in that peculiarly enjoyable way. But their third album, 2004’s Summer Make Good, was a disappointment. Where once their music set its hooks into my head and wouldn’t let go, Summer Make Good slid right on by, a gloomy and bland series of drones, with the few good tracks only serving to highlight how lacking the rest of the album was.

Go Go Smear the Poison Ivy, their fourth album, sees the group dropping members (only two remain from their first album’s lineup), gaining two new vocalists, and brightening their sound considerably. The first track, “Blessed Brambles”, sets the tone, opening with familiar ambient hums of synthesizers and a tumbling beat, but once the song kicks in, you’re immediately hit by stronger, more forceful vocals than anything Múm has done in the past. A celebration of the prosaic, harmonizing male and female vocals urge, “Bless the weeds that grow beyond / Just like rain and dust appear / Bless the does that got too fat / Let’s kiss the boys who pee in mud.” The song could be by no one else but Múm, but it’s considerably more assertive, active, and alive than anything on their last album. The strobing thump of “A Little Bit, Sometimes” comes next, and displays a darker mood but maintains the same self-confidence, a sign of a band moving around stylistically more than they have in the past.

The album’s debut single and stand-out track, “They Made Frogs Smoke ‘Til They Exploded” follows, and this, more than anything else on the album, is a revelation about the new direction Múm has taken. Skipping samples of female vocals, fuzzed out harmonicas and accordions, tinny synthesizers, rolling beats, and (as near as I can tell) completely nonsensical lyrics drop in and out, build and fall, and finally swell up with a kind of verve that rivals anything Múm has done in the past. Other highlights, like “Marmelade Fires” and “Guilty Rocks”, show a band that has decided to make songs, not soundscapes, while salvaging enough jittery energy to keep everything above the level of ordinary.

There are missteps, such as the album ender “Winter (What We Never Were After All)”, and those who enjoyed the more expansive, ambient aspects of Múm may be disappointed with the album. But there’s a real joy in listening to a group both prod and pull at the boundaries of their music, expanding their sound at times while reining it in at other points. And, for me at least, Múm regained the musical twitch that worms its way into my head so easily.

Listen: Various Tracks [at myspace.com]