Summer Make Good

Múm | Format: Audio CD

Product Details

• Audio CD (May 4, 2004)
• Number of Discs: 1
• Label: Fat Cat
• ASIN: B000228EL8
• Also Available in: Audio CD  |  Vinyl  |  MP3 Download
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (28 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #116,196 in Music (See Top 100 in Music)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

15 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars music for fog, November 18, 2004

By 

David Andrus (Santa Rosa, CA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Summer Make Good (Audio CD)

I was disappointed with this album on first listen. I was knocked over by the depth and emotional intensity of "Finally we are no one" and after seeing the band perform several of the new tracks live prior to the release of "summer" I was expecting another 5 star release. While the band (minus one) have not quite reached the pinnacle of their previous effort, this record is subtly brilliant in it's own right. It creates a darker sense of romanticism and is not marked as much by the idyllic naivete that made the first and second records so charming. Gone are most of the pretty melodies, and the carefully built to crescendo arrangements. What remains is fragmented, misty, and somehow mildly disturbing. Given that it was recorded at a lighthouse, this imagery starts to make sense. The songs are very manipulated (and only vaguely resembling their "live" versions) - altered significantly from their acoustic form, and always peppered by a kind of digital "fog"; shifting, creaking, bending sounds that give the record it's atmosphere. I managed to pop it in on a particularly foggy northern california day and this is the perfect way to hear it.

14 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars More Yesterday Was Dramatic / Less Finally We Are No One, July 26, 2004

By 

katahdin "katahdin" (New York, United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Summer Make Good (Audio CD)

Mum come from Iceland where there are more people than trees and apparently more talented musicians than people.

The running theory goes that because so much of the year is perpetual twighlight due to the nation's proximity to the arctic circle, that there is a consistent vibe in all the music coming out of the place. This vibe is apparently heavily influenced by a sort of hoovering between night and day and by extension, between dreaming and waking.

Anyway, Mum embodies this better than any other Icelandic group to me. They are pure magic. They'll sample the sound of ice melting and make a song out of it... and it's good.

Then they loop their voices in a way that makes you sure that you've heard them singing in a dream sometime when you were a child or perhaps in a film strip they made you watch in grammar school that tickled you into daydream that melted fluidly into naptime.

Finally We Are No One (2nd albumn) is more melodic and has more elaborate instrumentation than Summer Make Good (3rd albumn) or Yesterday Was Dramatic, Today is Okay (1st) which are both more rythmic.

I prefer their gently haunting melodies to their mystically vibrating rythm pieces... but that's just me.

If Julie Cruise singing Angelo Badalamenti's songs had a baby with Music for Films era Brian Eno and that baby was allowed to play with Bjork's Drum Machine... you'd start to approximate Mum.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Truly Zen, August 3, 2005

By 

Alan Ranta (Tiny Mix Tapes) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Summer Make Good (Audio CD)

With its slow building ambience, old world influences pillaging a list of bizarre and ancient instruments too numerous to mention, and frail vocals, Múm has produced a truly zen CD. As epic as it is fragile, there's a touch of spaghetti-western-final-gun-battle score, over the top but in their own nice way quality to almost every track but cut with an Amelie softness. Most people's enjoyment of this band will no doubt depend on what effect the lead vocals have subjectively. To some, she may sound like a broken-winged angel pleading for God's help in line with a same Bjork dealing with Beth Gibbons' emotions, but to others she may just be a little too Elmo or Robin, Kermit's nephew, to break through to a new plane of depression and wonder. Or she could be both and that's why you like it. It's a musical yin and yang.