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13 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
music for fog, November 18, 2004
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.
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8 of 8 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
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.
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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Sift Me Out The Window Sleeping, March 30, 2005
From front to back this album glides. No big bang, no top charts chorus. Filled with sounds (rather than instruments) making music and singing more like the humming you do inside your head.
I see though, why many people liked their older two albums: They're much more formulated, with actual direction - a rise and fall with different songs having different feelings and textures. I however love that the first few times i heard Summer Make Good, i didn't know when a song would end and the next would begin - i found it comforting and relieving.
i now listen to it just about everynight as i go to sleep (and i've had it for over 2 years (and counting)). This CD is in my top ten (and i listen to everything from Tool and deftones - Ani DiFranco, Elliott Smith, and Cat Power - bjork and Greg Brown - Tom Waits and Jolie Holland)
If you love music for what it is and could be and is not - this is a great album for you. But if you need formula and boundaries and process and direction this may not be for you (no negative conotation intended - it may just not be for you).
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