múm

It was interesting to go to a ballroom decked out and filled for the express, exclusive purpose of listening to the Icelandic post-rockish band múm because not only do I not own a múm album but I have never listened to a single múm song. In point of fact, I don’t know anyone who has, and if they have it’s never once come up even in passing or appeared while scrolling through their iPod or anything. I went in armed with only a working knowledge of their career arc: a onetime RIYL Sigur Rós now thought to have grown into their own thing that isn’t necessarily great or awful but is decidedly very good and cherished by a certain community of people, not a single one of whom, as I mentioned before, have I ever run into once in my entire goddamn life.

So: I went to a múm concert. Why the fuck not! This was mostly as a guest of opener Sin Fang Bous’ publicist (there’s your disclosure, FTC, and here’s my balls), and despite this potentially complicating relationship I hope my recommendation thereof holds water: Sin Fang Bous murdered. Frontman Sindri Mar Sigfusson exudes an easy sort of fuck-you charisma that belies the big romantic swoosh of his songwriting, and what sounds on record like a sort of cleaner Sung Tongs (2004) sense of group hoopla on stage emerges as just one man singing into three mics, heavily lidded, polite, kinda perfectly. His band seems content to find new ways to fuck with arrangements of otherwise perfectly wistful folkish songs, lending an air of almost psychedelic unpredictability to an otherwise straightforward songwriting sense (strong melodies, etc). He lassoed and summarily hog-tied the audience’s attention and walked offstage with a wave.

And so: there I was at a múm concert! I felt sort of like that Onion headline “Area Grandmother tries Indian food,” like, “Welp, I never in a million years thought I’d—but oh well, I’m game for anything.” My end result, like, one suspects, Area Grandmother’s, was whooshing purple diarrhea. But a note, first, on múm fans: these are friendly people. Some of them would smile at me when they made eye contact, and making eye contact is something lots of them did, for no apparent reason. On display was an encyclopedia of Weird Indie Accessories: scarves, my god, the scarves, but also berets, long coats, weird boots, funny little dockworker hats, even a Samoan guy, but all trumped, eventually, by one daring couple that brought a fucking projector carousel filled with science slides and sat observing them cross-legged on the floor. They did not appear to be on any drugs, including like weed. I was having fun!

múm hit the stage with the force of a thousand cupcakes, one clad in a Legend of Zelda tunic, another in a picnic blanket, another in a sparkly sweater. There were like seven of them or maybe a dozen, and for awhile, drum-propelled, the combination of unabashed theatricality and big instrument grandeur got us winedrunk, swaying in place. I do not know the names of any of the songs and will not look into it, but a good múm song can be pretty fucking great (as these kittenish fans knew!), easing a stark, classicist melody into something thunderous, deeply felt and known—big soundtrack music, for big movie moments, for us in the gold lamp-lit room. This was turning out okay. Indians call their bread naan?!

But shit got goofy, slowly loosening bowels: feet were stamped gradually, funny instruments were introduced, arms were held in the air. This was all fine enough, but burbles were happening in my stomach. If I had to pinpoint the exact watershed moment of goofiness, the shark-jumping as it were, it’s when the band ditched the post-rock anthemic stuff of the first few songs and sang a song called “If I Were a Fish,” about actually being a fish hypothetically but not metaphorically—my roommate bailed immediately upon its completion, perhaps wisely. From there, instruments started getting introduced with flourishes—alarm clocks, my heavens, and kazoos!—and they mock-marched, and then they did what I think should be universally acknowledged as the least cool thing any band on the planet can do, which is to have someone come out and hold up cue cards with lyrics on them, especially if those lyrics are about how much múm the band loves you the audience. Other bands: don’t ever do that. múm: please stop. The audience may’ve liked it but God hated that shit.

Sin Fang Bous, in short, made the audience’s earnestness seem like the correct way to live, politely and sincerely, and múm turned it into an earnestness carnival full of earnestness clowns and earnestness ring-tosses—Ernest goes to Iceland—and this was a gradually awful fucking thing to witness. We decided on the way home that múm are like a cross between the Dave Matthews Band and a marshmallow: as many instruments as the Dave Matthews Band, and as much fun to see live as a marshmallow. Sated and sager from my experience into the twee post-rock unknown, I kicked my shoes off by my bed, unbuttoned my pants, and scurried in little socks to the bathroom, where I promptly blew purple ass all over the back of the toilet bowl. I had made these turkey meatballs for dinner that just settled wrong, somehow.