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Track Review: Múm "Guilty Rocks"

1:50 p.m. · June 27, 2007 · by Jeff Klingman

Ever since 2000'''s minor IDM classic, Yesterday Was Dramatic, Today Is OK,Múm has been inching towards a more organic, lush sound. The hardly used childlike female vocals were ushered to the spotlight, the glitches smoothed and ironed. If their last album, Summer Make Good, took the band into a quiet and pensive place that felt like a detour from this progression, the release of the bizarrely named Go Go Smear the Poison Ivy, Let Your Crooked Hands be Holy seems like a restoration of the band'''s initial ten-year plan.

It'''s not exactly a slow build, because things are very busy from the onset, but the song does takes its time to develop. A choppy rhythm takes hold immediately, paired with a taunting keyboard hook. It'''s not until around the two minute mark when Kristín Anna Valtýsdóttir'''s naïve voice comes in, doing a terrific Mia Farrow impression ( for Rosemary'''s Baby fans). When the main vocal line enters it'''s pretty and direct, though muddled by a thick Icelandic accent. The lines we can make out are heavy handed and silly, something like, ''"Your pants fall down to the ground, filled with guilty rocks,''" but they don'''t make it sound any less beautiful (alright, maybe a tiny bit less). Strings snake in and the la la'''s fall to the back as the foreground singing becomes bigger, less intimate. The song is like the band'''s career in microcosm, starting off twitchy and eventually ending somewhere near recent Blonde Redhead. It might be slightly less to my taste than that sweet and alien debut, but I fully expect to be on the outside of a decisive majority with that opinion.