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Astrobotnia
Part 01
Múm
Finally We Are No One
Putloe House Collection
Let The Ugly Disappear
Múm
Finally We Are No One
Following the beguiling but fractured strangeness, frailty and beauty of their debut album, Yesterday Was Dramatic But Today Is OK, Múm were perhaps always likely to mesmerise or frustrate with their follow-up. That this album is an improvement on the last is almost a non-sequitor. It is a far greater album. What is suprising though, is that it is so good and so significant. So perfectly balanced, so wonderfully crafted, so lovingly produced, so fantastically paced, so new, so fresh, so unlike anything else of its time, Finally We Are No One is an undisputed success. Boards of Canada play with the sounds of children shrieking, playing, and subvert them into their own dark aural world, Múm also play with these sounds, keeping intact their innocence and wonder. Sigur Rós play with sweeping glacial sheets of sound and reverb, and beguile with quaint Icelandic vocals. Múm's twin-sister pairing enunciate word after sweet word over the top of lush electronica and sonar pulses that hark to exactly the same sort of lonely beautiful territory. Finally... is manifest with sounds, melodies and tunes that seem naïve and playful, with vocals that sound like they are being sieved through the lips of small girls. Skittering drums, the dunk and chime of xylophones and glockenspiels, the scraping of things against the floor, the crackle of operational machinery. 'Green Grass of Tunnel', 'We Have a Map of the Plane' and 'Don't Be Afraid...' all exemplify the childlike sounds that Múm revel with, where quiet shuttling drums form a ryhthm over which electronics dink and dunk playfully. It is the voices of Kristin and Gyda which form the largest impact on this second studio album, though. They merge as possibly the most sensual sound of Múm's output, and their previous album would have benefited greatly from a more substantial vocal contribution. This is because they are warm, rich voices, certainly, but vocals allow for lyrics to become a part of the Múm enigma too, and the kid-stories that Tinna and Inga tell in their songs are equally as enchanting as the music. Each of the songs has a dream-like or fantasy quality about it, so dense and captivating is the world that Múm have created. There are so many individual joyous moments to this album – the diffused cooing chimes of of 'K/Half Noise'; the spinning music-box sounds of 'Behind Two Hills'; the looping metallic scrape behind the bubbling beats and electronics and Siamese-closeness of the vocals on 'Now There's That Fear Again' – only a pedant would point to them all. But it is on the album's two final tracks that the full range of its beauty unfolds. On the penultimate title track, the slow grinding throb of cello splits through the sounds of a fading rumbles of thunder. It's like the retreat of a storm. The familiar chimes, dinks and scrapes emerge from this quiet: the album's most serene few minutes. The playful sounds subside into a tinny rumbling, as though gurgling down into a drain and the rumbles of the storm come back to the quiet fore of the track. 'The Land Between Solar Systems' slows the pace further, and heightens the melancholy. It is by far Múm's most efficacious tune to date. Each sound vibrates with submarine echoes, with a layer of crackling static underneath it all. The twins' voices are at their most lullabyesque, even opining 'sing me to sleep' before the beautiful coo that fuses with the stylophone notes of the chorus. The voices overlap, both one with the other and with the instrumentation that they sound so ethereally close to at times. Sliding scales of beautiful ticking beats and chimes merge with murmured sob-sound vocals until a rasp of firey percussion breaks everything down to the tinkles of piano and the twins' murmurs. Room still for one last lyrical refrain, before piano and sonar pulses too fade to quiet.
