The Icelandic experimental pop troupe Múm was formed in 1997, just a few years after Sigur Rós, and they have always played like a more intimate answer to their country's definitive post-rock band, with a bigger soft spot for Aphex Twin. Blending sweeping classical and rock instrumentation with glitchy beats, ambient electronics, and stagy vocals, their music "taps into a spirit of childlike wonder." You will notice the scare quotes, which are there because even though Múm superficially telegraph ingenuous naiveté, the genuine article feels scarce. To a child, everything is vivid and interesting, but Múm's music can be very dull. Their latest, Smilewound, is lively in spurts, but its appeal is still limited to listeners with insatiable sweet teeth and high tolerances for moony torpor.
For all of the inventiveness at the level of fine detail, the broad strokes of Smilewound are very broad indeed. Most of the songs fuse-- with variable coherence-- misty, fractured classical melodies with sputtering, runaway rhythm and tone programming, so lovingly wrought and kaleidoscopically contoured as to throw the instrumental work and songwriting in the shade. The slow dance of strings and piano on opener "Toothwheels" is several orders of magnitude less interesting than the roiling, spitting drums; the same goes for the sustain-drenched piano chords and jackrabbit-heartbeat rhythm patterns of "Underwater Snow". The mixed message of that title becomes even more confusing when paired with cooed lyrics about being a moon on fire, emblematic of an album where good ideas don't quite snap into focus.
It's remarkable that an album with so much fast, dynamic percussion still has such a lugubrious pace, which makes all the sharp details drift by in an indistinct mass. Eternity is the wait for anything to happen on "Eternity is the Wait Between Breaths", before a bell ostinato and some throttled strings give its opening stretch of synthetic seagull squawks any form. The music is usually tauter than that, but it's consistently slackened by the vocals of returning original member Gyða Valtýsdóttir, who replaces the divisive but unique voice of twin sister Kristín with an approachable but anonymous one. There's no expressive or dynamic inflection in her single vocal timbre, chaste and emotionally flat, which results in some of the most sexless music this side of 80s hardcore. Most glaringly on "Sweet Impressions", the vocal melodies are often supremely inert: Each. Word. Just. Sits. There.
The album's best tracks hint at a svelte, engaging electro-pop album lurking somewhere under the twee mannerisms. On the perky and awakening "When Girls Collide", 8-bit synths and skippy acid basses rocket around a meandering placeholder of a vocal. The waxwork singing comes to life on "Slow Down", with refreshingly staggered phrasing among big, gasping, reverb-brushed electronic chords, making for an xx-like moment on an album that could use more of that scrappy, sensual cool. The electronic track of "Candlestick" smashes through filter after filter like a locomotive, but again, a sparse vocal squanders the pop opportunity. Kylie Minogue, appearing on bonus track "Whistle", is a positive influence: The strong, lucid vocal line creates a center of gravity for the rippling matrix of synthetic twinkles, patty-cake percussion, and plumes of post-classical grandeur. Múm have a fine way with surface texture, but more of that core sturdiness would go a long way toward making their music feel as a wondrous as it tries to sound.
