Mumford and sons babel album cover without text full#
Star quality, of which Stefani has more or less No Doubt’s full allowance, is something people will generally wait for. In that time, Gwen Stefani has made two successful solo records, had two children and launched her own clothing line. No disrespect to the chaps with silly haircuts who account for three-quarters of Californian pop giants No Doubt, but it’s unlikely the 11-year gap between albums was at their insistence. It has been eleven years since they last released an album Mumford & Sons, Babel Island, out tomorrow You’ve either got it or you ain’t, and a wall full of gold records can’t change that. They have songs that hang and drip like honeysuckle on desert air that tread on cat-paws that roll and sway with the haunted rattle of a freight train.Īnd they underscore that what matters is not where you draw your music from, but whether you can illuminate it from the inside with your own spark. Their latest, lovely album, Algiers, is on the low-key side, but in performance they’re on peak form, with a rare lightness and vivacity. The fusion of Western and Hispanic implicit in the band’s name, taken from a town on the Mexican border, has become more intricate and exuberant with the emphasis on the touring outfit’s Mariachi horn players. It’s true that the American West has a ready-made resonance, an aura of cinematic myth, but this alone can’t explain why moving from the Mumford album to a Calexico gig takes us not merely across an ocean and a continent, but to a different world. That market will love Babel too, no doubt, with its Olde England meets-faux-bucolic sleeve its vigorous tappy-toe tunes (they’ve gone upbeat! Hoorah!) and its robust sonic embellishments. It’s a hallmark of our time, and of our burgeoning market for those darling crafted things that are just so Me. Folk music can be bloody or beautiful, raw or fragile but in Mumford’s hands it delivers, more than anything, tasteful, nostalgic solipsism. Joss Stone did this with soul The Vaccines are doing it with New Wave rock ’n’ roll. It seems that the most successful new British acts of any genre are so often those who offer the form of the thing without the spirit of it. There is a trend here, and it extends far beyond a folk revival that has given us both big-selling West London pallor (Mumford, Noah & The Whale, Laura Marling) and cultishly treasured Scots vitality (King Creosote, Withered Hand). Sigh No More, to me, is like jogging on the spot for 50 minutes, while men in waistcoats whine and strum in my ear.Įmpty Smiles: Mumford & Sons have all the notes, but not the conviction (Left to right: Marcus Mumford, Ted Dwane, Ben Lovett and Country Winston) Thus with folk-rock band Mumford & Sons, although the millions who bought their first album, Sigh No More, would surely disagree.Įither those listeners find in its strenuous, earnest insipidity a thrill that eludes me, or their requirement for a favourite album is quite different from mine, which is to be transported, one way or another. If your life has taken you from, say, nursery to private school, to Classics degree, to messing about with guitars, the results are liable to seem, well.
It’s not that such individuals are lacking in talent, it’s that their collective dominance has a deadening effect on the prevailing culture. Which is why the annexing of British pop by the well-to-do matters. Or at least, to those who would treat pop as a serious business.
The need for a personal hinterland, as Denis Healey memorably put it, applies not only to politicians but to pop musicians.
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