Good evening. It feels... strange to be blogging here again. It's been a rather long time since I've taken the time to do this. Seriously. Wow.
I'm not sure I even remember how to write.
Nevertheless, I'm in a writing mood, so I figured I'd sit down and write for a bit. Today, I want to tell you about this amazing album that I'm listening to right now. It is about the best damn album I've put money down for in a long, long time.
The album is Sigh No More by Mumford & Sons. It came out sometime last year. I was turned on to it by, of all things, SGU, which used the song "After the Storm" at the end of the season 2 premiere. I was swept up by the beauty of the song in that episode, and it became my personal quest to find out who was responsible for the song. Thankfully, the Internet exists, so my quest was rather short-lived.
Mumford & Son's album can best be described, I think, as a folk album. It combines interesting guitar/banjo lines with some metaphorically deep lyrics to produce helluva CD.
Soon after hearing them on SGU, a local radio station that specializes in a fun mix of current alternative rock and chart topping 90s pop-rock started playing "Little Lion Man". It didn't take me long to purchase the album so I could give the whole thing some listening time. Thanks again to the Internet, I impulse-bought the album within 10 minutes of hearing "Little Lion Man" for the first time. Yay for instant gratification.
I downloaded the album to my iPod and promptly started listening to it wherever I went. The first couple of listens were full of doe-eyed discovery. I'm not usually into the whole folk rock scene, but this album simply blew me away. It's been a long, long time since a band has struck me as Mumford & Sons did over that first couple of days. The songs range in emotion and tempo, fast and slow, sad and angry. It was a whirlwind of heartbreak and fury.
It wasn't until a few listens later that the true power of the album really started to dawn on me. The power of the lyrics, clever ways the band uses their instruments to help tell their stories. Even now, literally hundreds of listens later, the album is still mesmerizing.
Eventually a pattern starts to emerge, the way the songs are composed, their slow build to a powerful climax. The album becomes like a roller coaster, mellow, intense, up, down, moving, furious.Despite the similarities between each song's composition, the range of stories the band tells through their songs, and the power with which they tell those stories, keeps each sing fresh and interesting.
Many bands - I'd say nowadays, but this has held true since the dawning of the more modern, single-focused music era - seem to use their instruments merely as background for their singing. Heck, even some of the bands I like are guilty of this sin. Mumford & Sons defies this in most of the songs on this album. The instruments are just as much a part of the story and the feeling of the song as the vocals. The instruments communicate the pain of the songs, the rage, the joy. You can't just listen to and understand the emotions on the album - you are taken on a journey, you feel the emotions, empathize. A wonderful example of this is the aforementioned song "After the Storm." give me the chance (and a lot of time) and I'll tell you all about how beautiful that song is, the poignancy, the power that is carried through those 5 minutes of music. But for the purposes of this paragraph, I'll restrict myself to just the way the instruments add to the song. The guitars are simple, quiet. The vocals are stirring, rising and falling in an eerie and emotional cadence. Then there's the bass drums, that hit at just the right moments, just ratcheting up the power.
So good.
I really could go on (and on and on) about how awesome I think this album is. Even after the months of listening between when I started this blog post and now, I still crave listening to their album as one might crave a drug. It's addicting, and once I start listening to a song, I really just end up putting the whole album on shuffle. It is that damn good. I highly recommend checking it out.
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