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 Caught in the Carousel "There will be music despite everything"
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Mumford and Sons
Sigh No More
Glass Note
There is something in this music from British folk band Mumford and Sons that you don't really hear; something that gets inside you and then swells up, wavelike, rising; like the feeling you get watching a wild horse just go and go, defiant and hopeful, sometimes with a look that says don't screw with me because I'm not afraid; because this is what they have going on through the stark and haunting chapters of their new release Sigh No More, a thrumming, galloping, musically cinematic study that begins in the confessional grace of "Sigh No More" and then carries its listeners through the hopeful purity of cuts like "The Cave" and "Roll Away Your Stone" and into the abandoned and questioning, sometimes spiteful, "Little Lion Man" and "Thistle & Weeds." At times reminiscent of the cleverest and most soulful offerings from CSNY, "Timshel" stands in the middle of the album in the best of Mumford and Sons' stripped-down magnificence. This is not if-I-had-a-hammer folk. This is feel-my-hammer-play-your-spine music. I've seen these guys perform with a child's toy piano on stage and shook my head wondering how the hell they can make so much music with so little wattage and wire. Particularly impressive are the reworked versions of "White Blank Page" and "Little Lion Man," tracks I first heard when the band toured the States in 2008, when all I could do was pull up home recordings of them on Pandora Radio, and they were just kids, and I asked them, standing in an alley after their show, when are you going to give us this music, we need it here, and my god, do they deliver. Sigh No More is a promise kept.
—Andrew Smith
www.ghostmedicine.com
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