Time has not been particularly kind to Múm's music, though it hasn't been entirely cruel either. Early Birds, a collection of the Icelandic band's first experiments, makes for a strange listen in 2012, not exactly unpleasant but far from satisfying as a whole. Perhaps that's unsurprising, given the often sketchy nature of the material, a band's early attempts at finding their sound. All of the music here predates Múm's 2001 debut album, Yesterday Was Dramatic - Today Is OK, a seemingly out-of-nowhere record still beloved by listeners of a certain age, folks for whom the meeting of indie pop and the less-aggressive end of IDM was a long-awaited dream come true.
Hardly anyone is making music like this these days, at least not with the kind of profile Múm once enjoyed, so it's weirdly enjoyable to dip back into this almost-forgotten style. Múm's childlike electro-pop-- with its windup-toy rhythms and mechanical music box melodies and kiddie chamber music touches-- remains some of the best of its sort. Tracks like "Gingúrt" imagine what Kraftwerk songs might have sounded like if covered by Conky the stuttering beatbox robot from "Pee-Wee's Playhouse", i.e., cute and kitschy and dated in a good way. Like any sugary substance, Múm's early music is very tasty in very controlled doses.
But this was a sound that seemed to be everywhere in the late 1990s and early 2000s, and it was easy enough to burn out on its unrelenting tweeness after airing a few compilations by the likes of Nobukazu Takemura's Child's View label. Listening to Early Birds, even if you haven't paid attention to this scene in years, it's not long before you're remembering how exhausting this stuff could be. One can only take so many primary color melodies, always either chipper or glum, and those drums reminiscent of a caffeinated kindergartener making a kit out of wooden blocks, using safety scissors for sticks.
If anything dates Early Birds, it's the drums. A good percentage of these tracks are built around the hyper-antic programming of drill'n'bass, a sound that peaked in terms of creativity a few years before Múm even started making music. It may seem cruel to compare most electronic acts to Richard D. James, but up against something like "Girl/Boy Song", a very audible influence on Múm here, the flailing of the drums on tracks like "Bak Þitt Er Sem Rennibraut" and "Insert Coin" sound like a thin and unconvincing take on the real deal, all of the speed and none of the flair. They're fast and choppy, because that's how drums were programmed at the time, but they lack even the zany excesses of the style's more hacky practitioners. Múm sound childlike here in a very different sense, young people trying to get to grips with the influence of more mature artists.
Early on, what always saved Múm's music from cuteness overload was an attention to moody textures in otherwise lightweight music. And while, after almost a decade of post-rock, they weren't reinventing the wheel to the extent their fans sometimes claimed, they also achieved a strong balance between their bright synthetic side and rougher-edged live playing. You can hear them stretching in that direction here, but with a frustrating inconsistency.
"Bak Þitt" actually opens and closes with some lonesome piano, on a muffled tape that sounds more like a spooky field recording than something birthed in a hard drive. Sadly, Múm never develop the tension inherent there, simply dropping the murky instrumental in as bookends to the song's zippy electronic middle. Better are tracks like "Loksins Erum Vio Engin (Natturuoperan Song)", where happy-sad accordion and the faintest of la-la-la vocals are smeared over distant-sounding electronics, like some daydream of a outdoor Parisian café, listening to a street musician while people play Francoise Hardy and Mouse on Mars records in the apartments above you. Building fantastical environments, part sampled real-world texture and part wholly imagined sonic fairy tale, was something Múm once did very well, and we get our first tastes of it here.
They also love that accordion, and it figures in most of the best moments on Early Birds, along with a few of the clangers. An outer-space lullaby like "Múm Spilar (La La La)" is so unerringly lovely and richly textured that it's almost worthy of something off composer Raymond Scott's proto-ambient kiddie album Soothing Sounds for Baby. Again it's the unexpected wheeze of the accordion, along with Múm's increasing assurance in orchestrating their layers of tactile and ethereal texture, that elevates "Múm Spilar (La La La)" above bland chill-out music for infants. Play it more than once or twice in a day, though, and the track's all-smiles fluffiness will probably start to grate if you're not an actual toddler in need of a nap.
These more assured moments, gorgeous and swimming with detail even when simply playing with worn-out clichés, are why Early Birds can hardly be called a total falure. When they wanted, Múm could already do abstractly affecting without also tipping into cloying sentimentality. But since the bulk of the compilation is so second-rate and saccharine, an obvious learning experience put on tape, Early Birds is inessential, unless you were really dying to hear a beginner's take on the IDM class of 1999.
