aeblog

semi-lost in translation

I like Mum. I liked them before seeing them last night at the MFA because of their album 'Finally We Are No One" and now I like them for that same reason. Unfortunately, I found their live performance to be disappointing. It's not that they were bad or anything; it's more that I don't think they figured out a good way of translating their good songwriting and creative approach to music-making into the live situation.
I've talked about this before with regards to Tracy and the Plastics, but it is an important topic for me, so here I go again. Mum uses lots of electronics and acoustic 'sounds' in their music. They use them well in their recordings, but this live show seemed like someone said to them 'you can't use all those electronics live because it won't really *be* live with everything sequenced'. It seemed as though they tried to take this advice in certain ways, but were not successful, and in other ways they ignored this advice which caused further issues. Take the drums for example. As far as I can tell, the vast majority of the drums on the above-mentioned album (the only one I have heard, though they do have a brand new one and several other releases) are electronic, yet for some reason they had a drummer sitting behind an acoustic kit on stage. He was forced to play along with all the electronic sequences which were mixed much louder than him and in all honesty, despite how hard I tried, I couldn't even figure out if anything he was doing was audible at all. Live drums are so great because of their physicality. You see arms and legs flailing and hear the results in real time and you know for damn sure that the harder that guy hits those cymbals the louder and more powerful the sound that emanates will be. That's exciting and fun. It's not so fun to strain to hear if the subtle motion of a drummer is actually adding anything to the barrage of electronic percussion being spit out by the band's Powerbook.
The drums were just one instance of how I felt that the band was playing along with their computers as opposed to really dictating what was happening on stage. There was one time when I think each of the six band members were ringing cool little (Icelandic?) bells. This was totally neat except it highlighted the sequenced and pre-recorded stuff because the other parts of the song didn't stop while they were all preoccupied doing their ringing.
I felt like they were performing with the luxury of a huge bouncy safety net of sequencing. It's not trivial to play with sequencers given their rigidity, but having that solid totally predictable backbone dominate your performance is simply less exciting to me. Playing live should be more dangerous, I think.

Ok, so that was the negative, but they did some very cool stuff as well. The one thing I cannot give them enough credit for is actually taking an accordion and using it in a way that wasn't totally obnoxious! I'm serious. The lead singer (who also happened to have a great voice and funny mannerisms) played an accordion for a number of their songs, but she used it as this wide, open, bass instrument. I was amazed how she created these great gravelly bass lines that really filled out the low end.
Their songwriting was very unique; interesting forms and sonic combinations. They used lots of 'environmental' type sounds and had some great melodies. And their trumpet/flugelhorn player was a fantastic addition to the sound. Now I am feeling like I have been too negative here because these guys really are a very good band. I suppose I am judging them more harshly because I feel they are capable of so much more. But that's fair, right?

Overall this was certainly not a bad show, but I did feel it could have been better somehow. They paled in comparison to that other Icelandic band we all know and love, but they are young and talented and I hope they continue to progress and give us lucky listeners more unique music to appreciate.