This writer's himself still a relative novice trying to come to grips with Icelandic troupe MuM's tantalisingly different, but attractively eerie soundscapes, but the good news is even the uninitiated should look to "Nightly Cares" as a manageable point of entry to the band's strange, but appealing sinewy logic.
The launchpad for their new, lighthouse-recorded album "Summer Make Good," "Nightly Cares" is a thing of gentle, ethereal beauty and is both dreamlike and desirable. Featuring very close-miked, almost childlike vocals, it finds guitars and keyboards reluctant to rise too far above a whisper as they chime and caress, though there's a steady undercurrent of hiss and distortion to balance it out as well. Lovely and slightly disquieting all at once, it's not something you'd want to push or interfere with too much.
Flipside/ Double A-side "Once A Shiny Morning Puddle", meanwhile, is slightly more organic by design, with the initial Fender Rhodes meandering and taking in stabs of brass before guitars strafe around and become a more solid feature than usual with MuM and the whole thing builds up to an electro-enhanced storm that ebbs and swells, but refuses to die away completely. It's descriptive stuff that reminds quite strongly of Talk Talk's sublime later sonic adventures and is none the worse for that.
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These two tracks then suggest MuM are creating music as wild, enigmatic and untrammelled as the landscape they are hewn from. If the rest of the album's this good, it'll be really quite something.
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