After their native Iceland ceased to be the utopic paradise it once was after the collapse of their economy, and after singer Kristín Anna Valtýsdóttir left, one would expect Mum to sound a bit different. Kristín’s absence led to the last album, “Go Go Smear The Poison Ivy” sounding rather different to earlier work, and this album is different again. It’s tempting to look for the influence of the political situation in the music as well, but I’m not sure how concerned Mum are with the quotidian.

The opening lines to the first song on the album are “If I were a fish and you were a seashell, would you marry me anyway? Would you have my babies?”. A band brave enough to open an album with these words are clearly either above or beneath the political sphere. The album as a whole sounds deliberately regressive, but I mean that in an entirely good way. The childlike qualities of many songs sit comfortably with Mum’s wide-eyed worldview, and even the lyrics are largely simple and straightforward.

The language is, for the first time, exclusively English (if you disregard the nonsense-words). However, like countrymen Sigur Rós, to whom all Icelandic post-rock bands are inevitably compared, it’s clearly more the cadence and rhythm of words that fascinates Mum, rather than the meaning. The words tend to serve the music, rather than vice versa. However – and I’ll admit that this is mostly because I don’t understand Icelandic – the songs seem to have lost an element of the mystical ethereality which watermarked previous efforts. The songs are still delightfully pure, though, and this may be their most coherent album to date.

Many of the songs here are very repetitive lyrically, though never musically. Ordinarily, this is the sort of thing which might grate, but Mum pull it off with style, keeping the music interesting enough that the listener remains interested. All manner of clicks, pops, chimes and sundry other musical effects are employed as percussion, with fuzzy guitars and soft keyboards and strings layered on top.

Second song “Sing Along” is a joyous, harmony-laden nursery-rhyme-style song on which the male and female vocals join perfectly, while “Prophecies And Reversed Memories” is so catchy that after listening to it for he first time on a Sunday morning before playing cricket, it stuck in my head so firmly that I was humming it to myself four hours later when I absent-mindedly dropped an easy catch at mid on. “Hullabbalabbaluu” and “Kay-Ray-Hu-Hu-Ho-Hex” are strong doses of euphoric bliss which shift effortlessly from intensely uplifting to relaxed and melodic.

A delicate ode to light and innocence, this album is at once childlike and sophisticated, and a positive step in a new direction for a band who are clearly confident in their vision and proficient enough in their art to realise it. The whole thing is a joy from start to finish, at times evoking Psapp, at others Au Revoir Simone. Today’s paper reports that the birth rate in Iceland is rising despite the recession. If Iceland is anything like Mum’s utopic visions illustrated on this album, these children have little to worry about.

MP3s:
Hullabbalabbaluu
Prophecies and Reversed Memories