Music
‘JUST GETTING EVERYONE IN THE SAME COUNTRY TOGETHER IS REALLY DIFFICULT’ Hitlist THE BEST ROCK, POP, JAZZ & FOLK*
www.list.co.uk/music
✽✽ Doghouse Roses She sings (she being Iona Macdonald) while he (Paul Tasker) plays guitar, and together they make sweet, bluesy, folky music together. Kinda like Americana, but with a Scottish accent. Tchai Ovna, Glasgow, Thu 20 Aug. (Folk) ✽✽ Múm See preview, left. Oran Mor, Glasgow, Sat 15 Aug. (Rock & Pop) ✽✽ The Telescopes The English space-rockers will be presenting their third album Third Wave after a few career hiatuses over the last decade. Expect a shoegazey, elegant, noisy blur. Captain’s Rest, Glasgow, Sat 15 Aug. (Rock & Pop) ✽✽ Motherwell Music Festival It’s all kicking off this week in the home of Motherwell FC, with a fortnight’s worth of live music. Head down for a Saturday night show from local boys BMX Bandits, joined by the Primary Five and Soup Dragons; then a gig next Thursday from power-poppers, Teenage Fanclub, sometimes affectionately described as ‘The Bellshill Beach Boys’. Various venues, Motherwell, until Sat 29 Aug. (Rock & Pop) ✽✽ U2, Glasvegas and The Hours Its always good to see U2 but we’re more hyped to see this massive, mechanical spider thing that Bono and co will be performing inside. See page 8 for more factoids about the 360° Tour. Hampden Park, Glasgow, Tue 18 Aug. (Rock & Pop) ✽✽ Crystal Stilts Not the Castles, or the Antlers (keep up) these members of team Crystal bring distorted, dreamy shoegazey rock from Brooklyn. It could induce Jesus and Mary Chain flashbacks, but for all the right reasons. Stereo, Glasgow, Tue 18 Aug. (Rock & Pop)
Family affair
The Icelandic collective Múm make otherworldly, atmospheric soundscapes. Doug Johnstone meets the band’s founder to chat about art and banking
Getting the members of Icelandic folktronica collective Múm in the same place at the same time sounds like something of a cat-herding operation. With nine band members appearing on the band’s forthcoming fifth album, the beautifully titled Sing Along to Songs You Don’t Know, and each of them with a handful of other musical projects on the go, their preparation for an upcoming world tour stretching for months has been, well, pretty much non-existent.
‘We haven’t really been able to rehearse,’ laughs founder member Örvar Dóreyjarson Smárason. ‘Just getting everyone in the same country together is really difficult. We’ve only managed to get everyone in the same room a couple of times.’
That’s not to say their gig at Oran Mor this month
will be a shambles, however, far from it.
‘We’ve played a couple of shows, and everything clicked,’ says Smárason. ‘We’ve played together for so long, that we have a very good instinctual bond. That’s worth at least five or six rehearsals.’ That ‘instinctual bond with the music’ is the key to what makes Múm (pronounced ‘Moom’) a great band. On first listen, the band’s laidback, skewed take on electronica, folk, sea shanties and plinky kidsongs sounds completely otherworldly and alien, but there is an innate organic feel to their atmospheric sound pieces, a beautifully natural vibe which strikes at the listener’s heart immediately.
With Sing Along . . . there is more of an emphasis on vocals, the band continuing their trend of using the voice as another instrument on tracks like the
32 THE LIST 13–20 Aug 2009
exuberant ‘Hullaballabalú’ and ‘Kay-Ray-Ku-Ku-Ko- Kex’ (they love a daft song title, do Múm). The new album was recorded during a time of great social upheaval in Iceland. After the country’s infamous banking industry collapse, there were protests in the streets, forcing the government to resign. According to Smárason, the country’s economic collapse hasn’t all been bad.
‘I had a more difficult time living in Iceland before the collapse, because people in Iceland got very hypnotised by making money,’ he says. ‘Since then, people have opened up their horizons again, it’s had an absolutely positive effect in that way. Of course there are still huge economic problems here now that we have to face.’
Smárason was one of the thousands of people who took to the streets in protest at events, describing it as ‘one of the best times to be alive in Iceland. It was amazing to feel alive and feel like you could possibly take part in changing something’.
And paradoxically, Smárason feels the banking collapse could be to the benefit of his country’s cultural landscape. Iceland’s tiny community has always meant that people created art for love rather than the prospect of money or fame, with Múm being the exemplar of that attitude. ‘I think the current situation is going to have a great influence on culture here,’ says Smárason. ‘We’ve always had a lot of DIY culture and art here, and this has shown that that is the only way to do things.’
Oran Mor, Glasgow, Sat 15 Aug.