Mumford & Sons didn't have to be awful. A British neo-folk band, liberally applying the trappings of Americana, they made big songs well-suited to big stages, and they made them about as well as possible. But awful they were, nonetheless, a band so determined to be huge that they willed themselves into anonymity. Their latest effort, Wilder Mind, is a "rock" record in the least interesting sense of that word—a pastiche of the genre’s most common elements, from big percussion, electric guitars, and warm synths, to poignant but ultimately surface-level lyrics. It has all the elements of radio-friendly 2015 American rock'n'roll, with very timely nods to Tom Petty and Bruce Springsteen, but what it’s lacking in is any kind of originality, or message—and most importantly, it’s lacking in banjo, the only thing that ever set the band apart from the bro-rock horde in the first place. With the production help of James Ford (member of Simian Mobile Disco, and producer for Arctic Monkeys) and Aaron Dessner of the National, the band has successfully created perhaps the most adequate commercial rock album of 2015. It’s fine. But fine is nowhere near good, and, when the music is this empty, it might actually be worse than bad.
Love songs are low-hanging fruit, and on Wilder Mind, Mumford picks from the lowest branches. The first words uttered on the album's opening track, "Tompkins Square Park", are "Oh, babe," and like a boyfriend offering a generic apology, the song that follows sounds like it could be applied to any romantic situation at any time. There’s so little actual heart present in the songs, so little heartbreak, that it’s hard to imagine they were written from any kind of real place. This is music without any real center, designed only with montages and "Grey’s Anatomy" climaxes in mind. What the album sounds like, above all else, is easy money. These are songs that reflect emotion but generate none. They don't have feelings, they have #thefeels. The ‘I’ in these songs feels heartbreak but not too much; longing, but not too much; joy, but again, not too much. The influence of Dessner’s production is obvious in the richness of the arrangements, but where the National’s enormous sound is countered by obtuse and specific lyrics, Mumford matches a big, general sound with big, general statements of longing, and it falls flat. Petty and Springsteen are storytellers, bringing tangible and unique perspective to their personal narratives and those of their subjects. Mumford is telling the tale of the everyman, in that their narrative could be literally about every single man.
Songs like "Believe" are so lumbering that they are almost vulgar. "I don’t even know if I believe/ Everything you’re trying to say to me," Mumford sings in his best Chris Martin-soft-voice, before laddering up to a loud, crunchy apex of sound that explodes into a plea for some kind of redemption. The conflict on Wilder Mind is pedestrian—the confusion of someone with nothing real to lose. On "Cold Arms", the only song on the record that provides a vague respite from the formula, pairing Mumford’s plaintive vocals with a single electric guitar, he sings of a relationship where he and his partner are simultaneously "bloodshot and beat/ and never so alive." There’s no evidence of life on the track itself, which follows every imaginable rule so closely that all traces of life are erased.
Many of the songs on the album reference specific locations in New York City, from the aforementioned opener to the galloping "Ditmas", which names the small Brooklyn neighborhood, home to many members of the National, where the album's demos were recorded. But they make no reference to any location outside of their titles, and listened to sequentially, it seems as if any of these songs could switch titles with the next one with no discernible effect. They are 12 variations on vaguely Don Henley-inspired arena schlock, and in this transition, they've found a new bottom. Mumford & Sons' only hope to stand out was lost in favor of a cheap imitation, and not even a banjo can save them now.
