Modern rock isn’t dead—it’s just weightless. Save for the occasional nostalgia act attempting to rattle the terra firma, most radio-ready bands in the ailing musical genre have recently ditched the riffs for glassy keyboards, echo-soaked percussion, and vocal affectations as wispy as the white trail of an e-cigarette. Even Arctic Monkeys—a band that spent much of the past 16 years wielding six-stringed weapons with such old-fashioned macho swagger that they dressed up like goddamn greasers to promote 2013’s AM—have packed up their guitars and launched themselves into zero gravity, lunar taquerías and all.
The reach for streaming-algorithm brass rings has often been prescribed as the cause for this sudden dip in aggression and subsequent sonic flattening—but there’s precedent at play here too. Much-maligned British polymaths alt-J have spent much of this decade sanding down Radiohead’s Kid A-era abstractions to resemble smooth, uninteresting steel, and Coldplay’s influence also looms large, years after they finally managed to escape their own post-Radiohead shadow. There’s a revealing sequence in the just-released documentary Head Full of Dreams as the band performs at the 2001 KROQ Weenie Roast; sandwiched in between ultra-masc acts like Sevendust and SR-71, their sensitive pop-rock is met with boos and debris hurled at the stage. Fifteen years later, the cultural tables have definitively turned.
And no big-ticket rock band in the last five years has carried Coldplay’s influence quite like Mumford & Sons, the previously shuffling folk-rock troupe led by Marcus Mumford, who unwittingly led the EDM-reactionary “real music” movement in the early 2010s. Revisiting the band’s first two albums of largely unremarkable Appalachian-isms, it’s surprising to recall the level of vitriol that Mumford and Sons were met with practically upon arrival; as evidenced by Sigh No More’s “The Cave” and Babel’s “I Will Wait,” they were occasionally capable of turning out a moderately pleasing tune, and Mumford’s own contributions to the soundtrack for the Coen brothers’ gloriously melancholic Inside Llewyn Davis was proof of his inherent musicality.
But as time passed, Mumford & Sons got tired of sounding so out of time. 2015’s Wilder Mind ditched the washboard percussion and loud stomping for clean, streamlined, and positively Coldplay-esque rock music wallpaper-y enough for Zach Braff to disappear completely in; the following year, they gamely hopped over to Johannesburg for an EP of the same name, recording with African musicians like the Very Best and Baaba Maal. Delta, the group’s fourth proper LP, picks up where Wilder Mind left off, with a slightly altered approach; they’ve swapped producers, replacing Simian Mobile Disco’s James Ford with indie-mainstream Svengali Paul Epworth (Bloc Party, Adele), and they’ve incorporated some electronic gewgaws and rubbery beats into their anthemic music.
You could conceivably slip most of Delta’s 14 songs in between recent hits from Imagine Dragons and twenty one pilots, and whether that’s a good thing is totally up to whoever’s listening. But Delta is also the strongest collection of songs Mumford & Sons have released to date; the cool-handed atmospherics and dreamy melodies here simply suit them better than any other sonic guise they’ve worn, from the cresting crescendo of opening track “42” to the rippling chorus of “Woman” and “October Skies”’ aching emptiness. Close your eyes while listening to the simmering mid-tempo pop of “Picture You,” and you can practically imagine Chris Martin belting it out in front of a massive crowd.
More than anything else, Delta evokes Coldplay’s 2005 album X&Y—and not just in its predilection for gaseous choruses and moody melodies. Coldplay’s worst album is notorious for its imposing length, and the 61-minute Delta is similarly a slog, as Mumford & Sons’ new sound takes on a dull, beige quality when consumed for too long. When singer-songwriter Gill Landry shows up in the middle of “Darkness Visible”’s stormy pianos to recite an excerpt of John Milton’s Paradise Lost (yes, really), the dramatic finality is undercut by the fact that there are are four more songs that follow. But at least Landry’s poetizing lends some personality to the album. While Mumford & Sons have never sounded as purely palatable as they do on Delta, they do so at risk of achieving total anonymity—the aural equivalent of unflavored Alka-Seltzer dissolving in a glass of milk.
Somewhat bewilderingly, the album’s strongest moment comes when Mumford & Sons evoke their folksy roots: the moonlit ballad “Wild Heart,” buried in Delta’s back half, which showcases Mumford’s lovely vocal talents over brushed drums, tinkling piano, and a quietly strummed acoustic guitar. “No one is better armed/To tear me down with a slight of the tongue,” Mumford murmurs, addressing not his fiercest critics but the give-and-take that is passionate, complicated love; it’s an intimate, revealing moment on an album in which he and his reformed jug-band compatriots paradoxically reach for a musical approach both more complex and more approachable, instead landing squarely in the realm of mediocrity.
