Built fjord tough

>> Múm produce a lighthearted record
in lighthouses and schoolhouses

FIRE AND ICE: Múm

by LORRAINE CARPENTER

“We were just lighter in our hearts while we were making this album,” says Örvar Smárason, co-founder of Iceland’s Múm. “We were better friends and we were much more open to playing around because we didn’t feel any pressure. It’s all about the energy that comes from inside.”

Go Go Smear the Poison Ivy is the record in question, the band’s fourth, a winsome tangle of beats, bass, piano, strings, horns, percussion and vocals. While not as quaint and demur as their 2002 sophomore LP, Finally We Are No One, its spirit is more akin to that record than 2004’s Summer Make Good, a witch’s brew of ominous lullabies. Go Go isn’t devoid of melancholy, but even its most downcast song (“Moon Pulls,” perhaps) has a silver lining, its ascendant melodic strain and matching vocal harmony lending it a happy ending.

Along with the three-year gap between albums (including a full year spent apart), Múm’s latest line-up change clearly had an impact on the mood of their music. The band has ballooned to seven, including a pair of female vocalists, but gone is the childlike coo of Smárason’s old squeeze Kristín Anna Valtysdóttir, whose voice was charming in ’02 and borderline evil in ’04—she’s since made a comeback as Kria Brekkan and released an album with her husband, Avey Tare of Animal Collective.

As Múm have long preferred recording in natural settings to clocking in and out of a studio, it’s tempting to assume that their location was key to their latest evolution. But, for their first month of work, the band returned to the site that produced Summer Make Good.

“We started this one in the same lighthouse,” reports Smárason. “Then we spent two weeks on a small island in Finland and we did more recordings in the West Fjords.”

The latter two locations were schools, the first an abandoned building that hadn’t been used in roughly half a century, the second a functional music school that stood empty during the summer break. The band took full advantage of the glockenspiels, xylophones, flutes, recorders, piano and double bass on hand, but it all happened by chance.

“We went to this town thinking we were going to record in a fish factory, but then the guy who owned the factory wouldn’t let us—it would have been very noisy ’cause there are always these factory sounds, so I don’t know what we were thinking. But then somebody just said, ‘Why don’t you use the school? Here’s the key.’”

Luck may have been with them during recording, but touring has proven to be another matter. Roughly a week prior to presstime, their first North American date was cancelled as ticket-holders were forced to flee California’s wildfires. But Múm wouldn’t have been able to play regardless, because their visas were withheld.

“Then only the band got their visas and we had to leave the crew behind, so they’re still not here with us,” Smárason explains. “It’s a bit of a hectic way to start the tour but it’s turning around now—we’re in a beautiful place in San Francisco at the moment, and it’s all going to be good.”

With Hauschka and Tom Brosseau at
le National on Saturday,
Nov. 3, 8 p.m., $20