..:: audio-music dot info ::..


Main Page      The Desert Island      Copyright Notice
 Aa Bb Cc Dd Ee Ff Gg Hh Ii Jj Kk Ll Mm Nn Oo Pp Qq Rr Ss Tt Uu Vv Ww Xx Yy Zz


Mumford & Sons: Wilder Mind

 A l b u m   D e t a i l s


Label: Island Records
Released: 2015.05.04
Time:
 65:46
Category: Alternative Rock, Indie Folk
Producer(s): James Ford
Rating:
Media type: CD
Web address: www.mumfordandsons.com
Appears with:
Purchase date: 2016
Price in €: 1,00





 S o n g s ,   T r a c k s


[1] Tompkins Square Park (Mumford & Sons) -  5:11
[2] Believe (Mumford & Sons) -  3:41
[3] The Wolf (Mumford & Sons) -  3:41
[4] Wilder Mind (Mumford & Sons) -  4:38
[5] Just Smoke (Mumford & Sons) -  3:10
[6] Monster (Mumford & Sons) -  3:56
[7] Snake Eyes (Mumford & Sons) -  4:08
[8] Broad-Shouldered Beasts (Mumford & Sons) -  4:20
[9] Cold Arms (Mumford & Sons) -  2:49
[10] Ditmas (Mumford & Sons) -  3:38
[11] Only Love (Mumford & Sons) -  4:36
[12] Hot Gates (Mumford & Sons) -  4:47
[13] Tompkins Square Park [live] (Mumford & Sons) -  5:13
[14] Believe [live] (Mumford & Sons) -  3:49
[15] The Wolf [live] (Mumford & Sons) -  3:53
[16] Snake Eyes [live] (Mumford & Sons) -  4:15

 A r t i s t s ,   P e r s o n n e l


Marcus Mumford - Lead Vocals, Guitar, Drums
Ted Dwane - Vocals, Electric Bass
Ben Lovett - Vocals, Piano, Keyboard, Synthesiser
Winston Marshall - Vocals, Guitar

James Ford - Drums, Percussion, Keyboards, Producer
Tom Hobden - Violin
Thomas Bartlett - Keyboards
Dave Nelson - Trombone
Aaron Dessner - Keyboards
Benjamin Lanz - Trombone

Jonathan Low - Engineer
George Murphy - Engineer
Jimmy Robertson - Engineer
Robert Orton - Mixing
Tony Lake - Mixing
Bob Ludwig - Mastering
Ross Stirling - Design, Photography
Ty Johnson - Photography

 C o m m e n t s ,   N o t e s


Recorded between 2014-15 at the AIR Studios (London, England)



Who could blame Mumford & Sons for running away from their signature banjo stomp? Come 2015, when Wilder Mind saw spring release, so many bands had copped their big-footed folk jamboree that Mumford & Sons could feel the straitjacket constricting, so it's not a surprise that the group decided to try on something new. A change in fashion isn't strange -- no band wants to be pigeonholed -- but the odd thing about Wilder Mind is now that everybody else sounds like Mumford & Sons, Mumford & Sons decide to sound like everybody else. Without their old-timey affectations, the band seems interchangeable with any number of blandly attractive AAA rockers, a group that favors sound over song - a curious switch for a purportedly old-fashioned quartet. Sometimes, the band do swing for arena-filling hooks and connect - the quietly escalating "Believe," the incessant surge of "The Wolf," "Ditmas," which is the only song here that would scale to bare-bones acoustic arrangements - but usually they subsist on a simmer, letting their immaculate, tasteful rock bubble quietly without ever threatening to spill over the edge. Often, the persistent, moody murmur recalls a diluted Kings of Leon, a comparison that can't help but underscore how Mumford & Sons have made the journey from retro throwback to glistening modern construction. Where once they carved their music out of reclaimed wood, they're now all steel and glass - a bit sleeker but also a bit chillier. Such a description suggests this is a big shift, but it's all surface: underneath that exterior, Wilder Mind is the same Mumford & Sons, peddling reasonably handsome reconstructions of times gone by.

Rating: 2.5/5

Stephen Thomas Erlewine - All music Guide



Mumford & Sons are the defining act of the past few years' folk revival, but there's always been more rock in their blood than that label suggests. Cathartic, heart-swelling anthems like 2010's "Little Lion Man" and 2012's "I Will Wait" are arena rock through and through, even if they are mostly acoustic — just ask anyone who has seen one of the band's sold-out shows.

So the news that Mumford & Sons planned to use electric instruments more prominently than ever on their third studio album was no real surprise. They wrote most of Wilder Mind at producer Aaron Dessner's Brooklyn studio, and at times, the music resembles the darkly textured indie rock of Dessner's main gig, the National, by way of classic influences like Jackson Browne and Dire Straits. It's at once driving and stately, ornate and headlong. "Ditmas," named after the neighborhood where it was written, shifts from a rhythm track that's as taut as a kraut-rock jam into a huge chorus stacked high with hard-charging riffs. "The Wolf" is open-air garage rock with shades of Springsteen, while "Snake Eyes" falls between Radiohead at their coziest and the AOR pastorals of the War on Drugs.

As his bandmates pull back on their galloping strum and shout-along harmonies, Marcus Mumford, too, moves in a subtler direction with his vocals. On 2010's Sigh No More and 2012's Babel, he often sang in a barrel-chested growl. Here his singing is more restrained and agile, leaning on the vulnerable, world-weary side of his lower register to explore an intimacy that can get pretty dark: "I look at you all torn up/I left you waiting to bleed," he sings against languid chords on "Cold Arms." Instead of a traditionalist troubadour, he sounds like a complex rock frontman.

Folkie fans shouldn't be too alarmed, though. Even amid all the new sounds on Wilder Mind, the impassioned earnestness that made Mumford & Sons stars is still their driving force. The same cleareyed, full-hearted intensity that set the table for fellow U.K. roots newcomers like Laura Marling and Jake Bugg animates highlights like "Believe" and "Only Love," where lyrics about balancing doubt and hope in the face of fading romance take on a universal power. "Open my eyes, tell me I'm alive," Mumford sings on "Believe," as rolling drums and heroic guitar flares carry him up to the rafters.

A few of the songs on Wilder Mind directly address the band's stylistic growth. On "Broad-Shouldered Beasts," Mumford takes his woman to Manhattan for a big night out dancing "under dizzy silver lights," only to find she's scared of the freedom he's offering. And then there's the album's sharpest moment, the coursing breakup tune "Tompkins Square Park," where the singer demands that someone meet him in the East Village for one last desperate shot of love. The sentiment is Springsteen, the guitars are straight-up Strokes, and even if it's not going to work out for the relationship in this song, the music itself bristles with self-assurance. Welcome to the modern age, guys.

Rating: 3.5/5

Jon Dolan - May 5, 2015
© Rolling Stone 2017



Hate all you want on Mumford & Sons’ vest- and suspenders-adorned, banjo-worshipping, stomping, clapping, kick-drumming brand of poser-folk, but at least it was their thing. Not only was that thing a massive mainstream success, but it also put frontman Marcus Mumford on a gradual path to earning his genre bona fides, participating in such legitimate ventures as the film Inside Llewyn Davis and collective project The New Basement Tapes. Having wooed the masses, and with a shot at some cred among critics and purists, the band had a perfect opportunity on its third album to lose the faux-Americana aesthetics, enlist the help of an outside-the-box creative guru, tweak, experiment, and break some new ground. So for Wilder Mind, the group boxed up their waistcoats, left their banjos in their cases, got a real drum set, hooked up with The National guitarist Aaron Dessner and respected producer James Ford and… made a dozen tracks of forgettable, run-of-the-mill stadium rock.

On the surface, Mumford & Sons ditching acoustic instruments for their plugged-in counterparts—in essence, reworking their entire identity at the peak of their popularity—appears to be a pretty bold move. In execution, however, there’s nothing daring about it. Rather than risk alienating the band’s adult-alternative fan following, Wilder Mind shamelessly panders to it with bland Coldplay-aping melodies driven by borrowed Snow Patrol power chords and splashed with Kings Of Leon-style heartland trad-rock. With Dessner on board, Mumford & Sons have accurately mimicked The National’s sense of melancholy and slow-building song structures, but can’t duplicate that group’s compelling, creeping tension or or its delicate contrast of claustrophobic and expansive atmospheres.

While Wilder Mind, overall, may have a darker mood than its predecessors, it lacks the angry, bitter laments that gave the band’s previous folk chant-alongs a dramatic edge. Instead the record tediously wallows in vague relationship dissatisfaction, insecurity, and discontent. The group—dutifully following its overused soft-then-loud blueprint on nearly every song—also appears to operate under the assumption that electric guitars, keyboards, and drum loops can, by themselves, turn dull cuts such as “Believe” into forceful, rollicking anthems. This unrefined game-plan is most evident on “Only Love”: Start with spare, murmured something-or-other about heartbreak, then ride a prolonged pounding, repetitious jam to the finish line. Cut, repeat.

By trying to clobber the audience with huge sounds and relentless rhythm, the foursome hasn’t taken the time to put together the crafty hooks and licks that gave their prior two albums some undeniably catchy moments. Adding absolutely nothing to the vast canon of generic modern arena rock, this rebranding is pointless. With Wilder Mind, Mumford & Sons have morphed from a band that’s easy to either love or hate into a band that’s hard to care much about at all.

Chris Mincher - May 5, 2015
A.V.Club © Copyright 2017 Onion



Three years ago, the fire fueling the folk revival was at maximum combustion. Radio airwaves were awash in suspendered combos ravaging acoustic guitars and harmonizing around the old gin mill. It was the first rock movement to significantly crash the mainstream since Fred Durst stuck cookies up your yeah, and while plenty of like-minded groups scored hits, Mumford & Sons were the clear kings of the scene. So it’s mildly shocking that the British foursome’s third album, Wilder Mind, takes the sound that led them to multiplatinum success and chops it to bits. The band has swapped out its rail-riding sing-alongs for plugged-in epic rock that aims for the majestic swoop of U2 and poses a fascinating question: Should the Mumford men be lauded for exploring the world outside their artisanal-pickled comfort zone, or condemned for playing against their obvious strengths?

Their latest retains the structural dynamism of its predecessors (“Snake Eyes” builds and balloons as expertly as the top 10 smash “I Will Wait”), and though the overall volume is greater, the passion is lacking. Marcus Mumford tries hard to emote through the crashes of “Tompkins Square Park” and “Just Smoke,” but his full-throated bellow tends to fight songs instead of carry them. The obsessively buffed production doesn’t help—it scrubs gentle tunes like “Only Love” so clean they might as well be wrapped in plastic.

Wilder Mind is too well executed to truly dislike, but it also doesn’t provide many reasons to rally around Mumford & Sons’ brave new world. If they’re serious about this direction, they’ll need to diversify their sound. Maybe add a banjo?

Rating: B

Kyle Anderson - April 29, 2015
Entertainment Weekly / Copyright © 2017 Time Inc.



Mumford & Sons are a band who have found the kind of success most artists would do anything to maintain. Their debut album, Sigh No More, and its successor, Babel, have sold something like 7m copies. Their stomping acoustic style proved hugely influential, albeit on the kind of music that makes up the BBC Radio 2 playlist: you could hear its echoes in Gary Barlow’s Let Me Go, Avicii’s Wake Me Up and James Blunt’s Bonfire Heart. In Britain, their success came with a side-order of opprobrium – their twee, faux-rustic image was mocked everywhere from Vice to Viz (“Mumford & Sons – they tour the English countryside in their rustic turbo jet-powered haywain”) – but in the US, a country less minded to sneer at their public-school educations and evangelical-Christian background, Mumford & Sons have been impressively fast-tracked into the rarefied orbit of rock legends. They performed with Bob Dylan and Paul Simon and were singled out for praise by Neil Young – frontman Marcus Mumford was among those invited to complete a selection of unfinished 60s Dylan songs on last year’s Lost on the River: The New Basement Tapes.

All that success and yet, here they are, on the verge of releasing their third album, scoffing at virtually everything that made them famous – their old neckerchief-and-tweed-waistcoat image (“we looked like absolute idiots”), their name (“a ballache”), even their sound (“fuck the banjo, I fucking hate the banjo”) – and talking about the “inevitability” of losing fans with their radical new direction: “Our new sound will freak people out.” Having irritated a lot of people en route to becoming one of the biggest bands in the world, it would seem Mumford & Sons have finally succeeded in irritating themselves.

That all sounds like a dramatic volte-face, but it turns out to be even more unprecedented than it first appears. Rock history is littered with hugely successful artists who alienated their audience by making an unexpected left-turn into more experimental, less commercial territory. It’s less easy to recall a band as successful as Mumford & Sons risking their fanbase in order to make music that’s actually more anodyne and generic than before, which is what appears to have happened on Wilder Mind. The banjo, accordion and the bass drum operated by Marcus Mumford’s foot have indeed vanished as promised, but they’ve been replaced by expansive, stadium-friendly indie-rock filled with surging choruses and guitars smothered in U2ish echo. You can understand a desire to change, to demonstrate that there’s more to them than fans and detractors alike previously thought, but you listen to Believe or The Wolf and think: who’s going to be “freaked out” by this? Someone who’s never heard Snow Patrol?

This is normally a sound that speaks of vaulting commercial ambition: it’s the sound of the new artist with their eyes firmly fixed on the big prize, or of the indie band sick of the toilet circuit, packing away their quirks and and cravenly going for the mainstream dollar. But Mumford & Sons are already commercially successful beyond most artists’ wildest dreams; this must be the music they genuinely want to make. On closer examination, what seems to have happened is that the quartet have set their sights on making something like the warped take on expansive, wistful, 80s American rock found on the War on Drugs’ acclaimed 2014 album Lost in the Dream. That would certainly explain the preponderance of atmospheric e-bowed guitar, and why Marcus Mumford’s singing voice – last spotted bobbing about somewhere in the mid-Atlantic – seems to have made it to dry land and got itself a green card. In fairness, Wilder Mind occasionally gets close to that aim. If you can get past the sound of a man who grew up in Wimbledon singing like he spent his youth in Wyoming, the title track is a beautiful song that succeeds in conjuring up the kind of atmosphere that the album’s twilight-skyline sleeve suggest they wanted to evoke: its guitars fall languidly over an insistent rhythmic pulse; it sounds appealingly like dusk settling on a city. Snake Eyes pulls off a similar trick. The music and vocals float over a drumbeat that sounds like Neu’s famous motorik pulse with its foot pressed on the accelerator: when the guitars finally catch up with it, it’s a genuinely exciting moment.

But elsewhere, Wilder Mind feels wearyingly flat and commonplace. There’s a compelling argument that Mumford & Sons became the most successful artists to emerge from the UK’s nu-folk scene by shedding most of its idiosyncracies – dispensing with its Wicker Man-derived creepiness, its tendencies toward lo-fi experimentation and its dabblings with electronics – in favour of something more straightforward and wholesome: rousing campfire singalongs, a rosy vision of a rural British past that owed less to Edward Woodward being sacrificed on Summerisle than David Jason proclaiming everything to be perfick in The Darling Buds of May. They do something similar to their source material here, stripping away the weird indulgences of the War on Drugs’ sound. What’s left is pretty ordinary indie-rock. The only thing to set it apart from countless other bands are the odd moments when Mumford’s folk roots poke through the glossy makeover. It’s not too much of a stretch to imagine Broad Shouldered Beasts rendered in their old acoustic style, while Monster is enlivened by an odd-sounding pedal-steel solo. For the most part, however, the music on Wilder Mind just passes you by: the nondescript sound of a band trying to shake off an image they feel they’ve outgrown, without coming up with anything to replace it.

Rating: 2/5

Alexis Petridis - 30 April 2015
© 2017 Guardian News and Media Limited



For all its colossal commercial success, Mumford & Sons’ Babel evinced mostly fair-to-middling critical disappointment at its lack of progress – an opinion perhaps shared by the band themselves, judging by the startling change in direction on this third album.

Out go the banjos, accordions and acoustic guitars, in favour of Winston Marshall’s surging electric guitar riffs and Ben Lovett’s synth and organ textures, while the simple kickdrum and footstomp beats are replaced by more propulsive drumming from Marcus Mumford. Former producer Markus Dravs, meanwhile, has been supplanted by James Ford, best known for his work with Arctic Monkeys. Here, Ford ensures that the Mumfords’ new power is not frittered away cheaply, with tracks like “Believe”, “Only Love” and “Snake Eyes” building gradually from spare, intimate beginnings to rollicking conclusions: the latter, for instance, opening with Mumford’s quiet murmur about “the compromise of truth” before a gently pulsing Neu!-beat leads to a climax that’s the closest electrified equivalent of the Mumfords stompalong.

Elsewhere, the new instrumentation affords a more nuanced approach, from the thrumming bass, piano, tom-toms and subtly tingling guitar evoking the resolute support of “Broad-Shouldered Beasts”, and the keening, spacious synth textures of “Tompkins Square Park”, to the unison guitar thrash that opens “The Wolf”, one of the more interesting, muti-faceted investigations of affection on an album which, like Babel, again focuses perhaps too single-mindedly on romantic problems. Mumford is forever seeking to mend fissures in relationships, wracked by guilt, doubt or recrimination, and hesitant about the future course of love. “I’m not strong enough to cradle the weight of your love,” he frets in “Just Smoke”; while even a comparatively rewarding alliance in the closing “Hot Gates” seems built on desperation.

Rating 4/5

Andy Gill - 24 April 2015
© independent.co.uk



When Mumford & Sons made their debut in 2009, the band's propulsive, earnest folk and banjos-and-suspenders aesthetic set them apart from their modern-rock peers. Rather than writing anthemic post-punk in the vein of the Strokes or Coldplay, Mumford & Sons offered something raw, acoustic, and a little bit hokey. When the wispy opening strums of “Little Lion Man” flourished into those uplifting banjo arpeggios, it seemed like a rootsy take on the Pixies oft-replicated loud-quiet-loud formula that, while not necessarily innovative, was at least identifiably Mumford & Sons' own.

Much has been made about Wilder Mind being Mumford and Sons' first foray into “going electric,” and from opener “Tompkins Square Park,” it becomes evident what that means: anthemic post-punk in the vein of the Strokes or Coldplay. Whether it's the icy pads that open up the vague and sterile “Believe” (“I don't even know if I believe,” Marcus Mumford listlessly sings during the chorus) or the Edge-style delay effects used on “Just Smoke,” the album is a thoroughly competent recreation of what Mumford & Sons think an adult-oriented indie-rock album should sound like.

Many of the songs on Wilder Mind were demoed at the National guitarist Aaron Dessner's studio, and, at its best, the album captures the measured, regal atmospheres of that band's best work. “Snake Eyes” escalates from a plaintive guitar figure and Mumford's crooning whisper to a rafter-rattling rocker with the help of a well-placed drum crescendo and some deceptively simple keyboard ostinatos, while the gorgeous bridge of “Broad-Shouldered Beast” is bolstered by a string section that's somehow both foreboding and romantically grandiose. This ends up being, by far, the most complex emotion expressed on the album.

Mumford & Sons' great gift remains their ability to raise the stakes just in time to lend power and momentum to an emotionally resonant final hook. As Mumford sings of “words empty as the bed we made” on “Ditmas,” a gorgeous guitar drone introduces the album's most vital, intense vocal performance. Unfortunately, moments like these often seems perfunctory and punched in; rarely do they feel earned and sometimes, like on “Only Love,” the propulsive motion (in this case, a hurricane of crunchy guitar downstrokes) supersedes the limp chorus that it's supposed to be building toward.

Wilder Mind's compositional predictability may have been easier to swallow if Mumford didn't attach it to such tired lyrical sentiments. Though “Tompkins Square Park” ought to be imbued with an implicit specificity (a very particular place evoking very particular emotions for very particular reasons), it instead stacks clichés in unexciting ways: “But no flame burns forever/You and I both know this song too well.” Oh but we do, Marcus.

This isn't to say Wilder Mind is a failure. Brief flashes of newfound power (the snare-propelled swagger of “The Wolf”) and sophistication (the lilting pull-off riff that opens “Just Smoke”) hint at a potentially fruitful plugged-in future for Mumford & Sons, but as long as the band mines the well-tread sonic ground of their contemporaries without adding any sort of personal stamp, be it instrumental or lyrical, then they're just going to top out as pleasantly forgettable. Whatever one felt about the banjos and suspenders, that version of Mumford & Sons at least conjured an opinion. Wilder Mind may be something altogether worse than divisive: unremarkable.

Rating: 2.5/5

James Rainis - May 4, 2015
SLANT Magazine



Here’s a sentence that would’ve made absolutely no sense in 2005 (and only slightly more in 2015): The biggest band in the world desperately wants to sound like the National. British folk-blasters Mumford & Sons’ second and most recent album, 2012’s Babel, sold 600k in its first week and has racked up another two mil since in the U.S. alone. It went on to win the Album of the Year Grammy and establish the quartet as the preeminent international touring act among contemporary rock(-ish) artists. Their signature strum-and-stomp sound has only become more pervasive in the years since, even being normalized through both the EDM and mainstream rock worlds via humongous singles by Avicii and Imagine Dragons respectively. Given that there wasn’t exactly a ton of artistic development or notable experimentation displayed by Babel — a commercial monster of essentially unmatched proportions by ’10s rock standards — staying the course would have been the predictable (and likely advisable) move for the band’s third LP.

Nope. In case you haven’t heard by now, Mumford & Sons have discarded their banjos for Wilder Mind, in favor for that more conventional six-string rock instrument, in a move that would more acutely echo the borderline-apocryphal narrative of Dylan Going Electric if a) “Selling Out” was a concept that still had any currency and b) the majority of Mumford fans were actually folk listeners. In any event, aforementioned indie stalwarts the National are now clearly the model for the quartet, a long-simmering fascination — they covered High Violet’s “England” in ’11, and recently rhapsodized to the NME that they’d “been huge fans of The National for ages. All of us, individually have got a very personal attachment to their music” — that’s culminated in the Londoners decamping to the New York garage studio of National guitarist Aaron Dessner. The group has subsequently traded in their vests for overcoats in their media photos, and now look less like busking rogues roaming Irish streets than upwardly mobile Williamsburgites closing down an after-hours whiskey bar.

The results are stunning, in at least one way. From the first echoing guitar lines of opening track “Tompkins Square Park” — one of two tracks on the album named after specific New York locations that have virtually nothing to do with the songs thematically, like a bragging postcard to their friends back home — the transformation is jaw-dropping, especially as the bass rumble and insistent drum thump kick in and all of a sudden you get acid craft-beer flashbacks to five simultaneous songs on Trouble Will Find Me. Other 21st-century underground rock touchstones abound throughout Wilder Mind — bluesy War on Drugs guitar streaks through the night sky on “Snake Eyes” and the title track, while the atmospheric, picking-heavy slow builds of “Ditmas” and lead single “Believe” flash Interpol in bright lights. But the National is the touchstone, with even Marcus Mumford’s vocals knowingly approaching the soaring solemnity of Matt Berninger on several tracks.

The cynical (and perhaps practical) viewpoint to take on this change in direction is to say that having scaled to essentially the highest heights of album sales and stadium success afforded to a rock-based outfit in 2015, the band adjusted their sights to different metrics: A Pitchfork rating, perhaps. For all the accolades granted Mumford & Sons in their ascent to superstardom, traditional critical acclaim has mostly eluded them; Babel earned a middling 63 score on review-aggregating site MetaCritic, and inspired a backlash big enough for the NME to ask “Why Do People Hate Mumford & Sons So Much?” To court the sound of a band like the National (last three MetaCritic scores: 84, 85, 86) could ostensibly be to court their audience and their noteworthy co-signers as well, among the final worlds the quartet have left to conquer.

Such open underground-slumming would seem to leave Mumford & Sons vulnerable to new levels of disdain from those the group is attempting to appeal to, but damn if their 2015 indie-rock facsimile isn’t a convincing forgery. When the chugging guitars and crescendoing drums of the pre-chorus to “The Wolf” finally achieve liftoff with the song’s fiery instrumental refrain, it’s as satisfying as any of the banjo mega-bursts of the band’s first two albums. Same for “Ditmas,” which integrates the largesse of a typically emotive Mumford hook into a explosive power-pop chorus that could’ve ruled radio two decades ago. Just as importantly, songs like “Cold Arms” and the title track are more bubble than boil, providing the album contrast in atmosphere and dynamism, both of which were badly missing across the flatly anthemic and maddeningly repetitive Babel.

Where the album fails to eclipse its predecessor, and where it fails to match the band’s new Brooklyn buddies, is in Marcus Mumford’s vanilla songwriting. People forget that as memorable as breakthrough M&S smashes “Little Lion Man” and “The Cave” were for their then-radio-unfriendly four-string leads, they were just as noteworthy for their bitter (“Your grace is wasted in your face / Your boldness stands alone among the wreck”), often violent (“I will let you choke on the noose around your neck”) lyrics, which were startlingly raw for early-’10s crossover hits. On Babel, those sentiments were replaced with bland comfort (“I will wait, I will wait for you”) and unspecific romanticism (“Hold me fast, ’cause I am a hopeless wanderer”). That trend continues with Wilder Mind, which aside from satisfying the requisite one-“fuck”-per-album clause on album lowlight “Monster,” keeps things nice and inoffensive on mostly love songs full of sweeping, detail-void sentiments like “Oh babe I’ve never been so lost / I wanna hear you laugh one last time” (“Tompkins Square Park”) and “And I hunger and I thirst… For some whispered words” (“Only Love”).

Ultimately, as much as it may shock on first listen the gambit of of Wilder Mind’s musical about-face might not be as, uh, wild as it initially seems. The kind of rock the Sons are aping here is a pretty natural fit for the group’s perpetually swelling dynamics — like the quartet themselves, just about all the album’s soundalike bands can be traced back to stadium overlords U2 in some respect, and indeed, parts of Mind sound enough like The Joshua Tree to get you combing the liner notes for a Daniel Lanois credit. Besides, “indie” in 2015 isn’t really indie anymore anyway — even the National themselves played the biggest stadium in Brooklyn a couple years ago — and Mumford do enough bet-hedging with the colorless chest-beating of their lyrics to keep it accessible to all anyway. The bet may or may not pay off for the Big Apple tourists — sales have thus far been (relatively) slow, and reviews harsher than ever, maybe they’ll end up indie out of financial necessity someday after all — but Wilder Mind will undoubtedly end up serving as sufficiently thoughtless comfort food for a whole new demographic.
picture-22979-1414617206

SPIN Rating: 5 of 10

Andrew Unterberger - May 8, 2015
SPIN



Much has already been made of Mumford & Sons’ abandonment of their beloved banjos for album number three. Yet anyone who’s seen the quartet live – which, when you consider their knackering touring schedule and commitment to playing far flung fields as well as arenas, is a great many people – will attest that there have always been hints of a rockier side lurking beneath the folksy facade.

With the assistance of Arcade Fire producer Markus Dravs on 2009’s ‘Sigh No More’ and 2012’s ‘Babel’, Mumford & Sons rapidly became one of the biggest bands in the world. The abrupt switch of producer for ‘Wilder Mind’ then, only seems a risk until you find out exactly who they’ve roped in to help out. Initial sessions were helmed by Aaron Dessner, from gods of gloom The National, and the album itself was overseen by Haim, Florence And The Machine and Arctic Monkeys producer James Ford. Interestingly, Florence regularly works with Ford, but is using Dravs as producer for her upcoming album ‘How Big, How Blue, How Beautiful’, like some high stakes game of chart-topping chess.

The influence of Dessner’s band is clear from the get-go, not just in the New York-centric title of opening track ‘Tompkins Square Park’ – which references a small East Village patch of green favoured by Hare Krishna monks and hipster dog walkers – but its driving bursts of melancholy. Before Marcus Mumford’s tobacco-glazed vocal sparks into life, you’d be forgiven for mistaking it for a particularly rousing offcut from The National’s 2010 album ‘High Violet’, complete with a propulsive chorus that nudges itself into The War On Drugs’ school of heartland rock. ‘Believe’ follows, with twanging guitars and stadium-reaching riffs. It’s far from typical of the record though, something which will come as good news to those upset at the group’s presumed Coldplay-ification. Second single ‘The Wolf’ is far more substantial, a thrusting and unforgiving three-and-a-half minutes that flaunt the band’s continued fondness for ye olde turns of phrase (“Leave behind your wanton ways”, compels Marcus, like a winsome medieval gent plonked down in the middle of Manhattan’s Avenue A.)

The record’s unmitigated massive moment is the unrelenting ‘Ditmas’, named for Ditmas Park, the Brooklyn district the bulk of The National call home. A desperate purging of love and loss, its four-to-the-floor beat is Mumford & Sons at their most enthralling; a band not just refusing to be pigeonholed in the waistcoats and acoustic hoe-downs of the past, but propelling themselves into the future by way of vast licks, emotive lyricism and one hell of a catchy melody. The major key revelry of ‘Just Smoke’ and tumbling fury of ‘Snake Eyes’ plug into a similarly widescreen vision, the band’s sound boosted immensely by the introduction of an actual drum kit, as opposed to the lonesome kick-drum Marcus has been booting about for the past six years.

Yet softer moments remain: the earthy harmonies of ‘Hot Gates’ offer hushed reverence, and the delicate ‘Cold Arms’ lets a lone electric guitar ring out as Marcus sings of lovers betrayed and left “all torn up”. ‘Only Love’ is the perfect synthesis of the two distinct elements of this album, and in turn its makers, a whispered build-up bursting into a gigantic beast, brimming with passion and 1970s Fleetwood Mac guitars.

Still missing the banjos? Didn’t think so.

Rating: 4/5

Leonie Cooper - Apr 17, 2015
NME ©1996-2016 Time Inc. (UK) Ltd.



With the production help of James Ford (member of Simian Mobile Disco, and producer for Arctic Monkeys) and Aaron Dessner of the National, Mumford & Sons has successfully created perhaps the most adequate commercial rock album of 2015. It’s fine. But fine is nowhere near good, and when the music is this empty, it might actually be worse than bad.

Mumford & Sons didn't have to be awful. A British neo-folk band, liberally applying the trappings of Americana, they made big songs well-suited to big stages, and they made them about as well as possible. But awful they were, nonetheless, a band so determined to be huge that they willed themselves into anonymity. Their latest effort, Wilder Mind, is a "rock" record in the least interesting sense of that word—a pastiche of the genre’s most common elements, from big percussion, electric guitars, and warm synths, to poignant but ultimately surface-level lyrics. It has all the elements of radio-friendly 2015 American rock'n'roll, with very timely nods to Tom Petty and Bruce Springsteen, but what it’s lacking in is any kind of originality, or message—and most importantly, it’s lacking in banjo, the only thing that ever set the band apart from the bro-rock horde in the first place. With the production help of James Ford (member of Simian Mobile Disco, and producer for Arctic Monkeys) and Aaron Dessner of the National, the band has successfully created perhaps the most adequate commercial rock album of 2015. It’s fine. But fine is nowhere near good, and, when the music is this empty, it might actually be worse than bad.

Love songs are low-hanging fruit, and on Wilder Mind, Mumford picks from the lowest branches. The first words uttered on the album's opening track, "Tompkins Square Park", are "Oh, babe," and like a boyfriend offering a generic apology, the song that follows sounds like it could be applied to any romantic situation at any time. There’s so little actual heart present in the songs, so little heartbreak, that it’s hard to imagine they were written from any kind of real place. This is music without any real center, designed only with montages and "Grey’s Anatomy" climaxes in mind. What the album sounds like, above all else, is easy money. These are songs that reflect emotion but generate none. They don't have feelings, they have #thefeels. The ‘I’ in these songs feels heartbreak but not too much; longing, but not too much; joy, but again, not too much. The influence of Dessner’s production is obvious in the richness of the arrangements, but where the National’s enormous sound is countered by obtuse and specific lyrics, Mumford matches a big, general sound with big, general statements of longing, and it falls flat. Petty and Springsteen are storytellers, bringing tangible and unique perspective to their personal narratives and those of their subjects. Mumford is telling the tale of the everyman, in that their narrative could be literally about every single man.

Songs like "Believe" are so lumbering that they are almost vulgar. "I don’t even know if I believe/ Everything you’re trying to say to me," Mumford sings in his best Chris Martin-soft-voice, before laddering up to a loud, crunchy apex of sound that explodes into a plea for some kind of redemption. The conflict on Wilder Mind is pedestrian—the confusion of someone with nothing real to lose. On "Cold Arms", the only song on the record that provides a vague respite from the formula, pairing Mumford’s plaintive vocals with a single electric guitar, he sings of a relationship where he and his partner are simultaneously "bloodshot and beat/ and never so alive." There’s no evidence of life on the track itself, which follows every imaginable rule so closely that all traces of life are erased.

Many of the songs on the album reference specific locations in New York City, from the aforementioned opener to the galloping "Ditmas", which names the small Brooklyn neighborhood, home to many members of the National, where the album's demos were recorded. But they make no reference to any location outside of their titles, and listened to sequentially, it seems as if any of these songs could switch titles with the next one with no discernible effect. They are 12 variations on vaguely Don Henley-inspired arena schlock, and in this transition, they've found a new bottom. Mumford & Sons' only hope to stand out was lost in favor of a cheap imitation, and not even a banjo can save them now.

Rating: 2/10

Maud Deitch - May 7 2015
The Pitchfork Review



Wilder Mind is the third studio album by British rock band Mumford & Sons. It was released on 4 May 2015 through Gentlemen of the Road, Island, Glassnote and Universal Music Group. It was an international success in its first week on sale, charting at number one in seven countries, topping both the UK Albums Chart and the US Billboard 200, and reaching the top 5 in nine other countries. Five singles have been released from the album, "Believe", "The Wolf", "Ditmas", "Tompkins Square Park" and "Just Smoke". After working with Markus Dravs for their first two albums, the band decided to hire producer James Ford and The National's Aaron Dessner. The album marks a departure from the group's folk rock sound, as they abandoned their signature acoustic instruments (such as banjo and upright bass) for electric ones and added a session drummer to fill out their rhythm section.

In September 2013 following the end of the world tour in support of their second album Babel, Mumford & Sons began what they thought would be a lengthy break, but found themselves back at work only five months later. After a couple of days in London at Dwane’s studio, the band headed back to Brooklyn to write and demo tracks at the garage studio owned by The National’s Aaron Dessner, where the band had spent time recording demos In the months leading up to the end of the Babel tour. Lovett and Marshall were living in New York, with Mumford & Dwane still based in England, so for the next eight months, the band split their writing sessions between Dessner's New York garage and London's Eastcote Studios, where their debut album, Sigh No More had been recorded. The band then recorded Wilder Mind at Air Studios in London with producer James Ford, who also traded off drumming duties with Mumford.

Wilder Mind was released to a mixed critical reception. At review aggregator Metacritic, which assigns a normalized rating out of 100 to reviews from professional critics, the album received an average score of 54, indicating "mixed or average reviews". In a five-star review, Neil McCormick of The Daily Telegraph hailed the album as a "triumph" and wrote that Marcus Mumford "has never sounded better than on this overwhelmingly tense and bittersweet album". Andy Gill of The Independent felt that the band's musical transition towards more guitar-oriented instrumentation had been successful, singling the album's "surging electric guitar riffs with synth and organ textures" for praise. Leonie Cooper of NME was also positive, noting Aaron Dessner's large influence on the album's production and concluding: "Still missing the banjos? Didn’t think so". Garrett Kamps of Billboard stated that "not only does Wilder Mind reintroduce the band members as rock gods worthy of the title, it does so without changing what fans cherished most about them in the first place: their songwriting, their sentiment, their gusto." At Rolling Stone, Jon Dolan wrote that "the sentiment is Springsteen, the guitars are straight-up Strokes, and even if it's not going to work out for the relationship in this song, the music itself bristles with self-assurance." In a mixed assessment, Stephen Thomas Erlewine of AllMusic felt that in their attempt to break away from their vintage folk leanings, the band now "seems interchangeable with any number of blandly attractive AAA rockers" and wrote that "the odd thing about Wilder Mind is now that everybody else sounds like Mumford & Sons, Mumford & Sons decide to sound like everybody else." While noting that "brief flashes of newfound power and sophistication hint at a potentially fruitful plugged-in future for Mumford & Sons", James Rainis of Slant Magazine felt that the album as a whole was unremarkable, criticizing its "compositional predictability" and "tired lyrical sentiments". Pitchfork Media's Maud Deitch called Wilder Mind "a 'rock' record in the least interesting sense of that word—a pastiche of the genre's most common elements, from big percussion, electric guitars, and warm synths, to poignant but ultimately surface-level lyrics". PopMatters's Brice Ezell commented on how the band had "stripped away the artifice from their ostensible Americana aesthetic to reveal the boilerplate alt-rock that forms its core circuitry".

Wilder Mind debuted at number one on the UK Albums Chart, marking the band's second number one album in the United Kingdom. It sold 81,300 copies in its first week of release to become the second fastest-selling album of 2015. The following week saw the album spend a second consecutive week at number one in the UK, becoming the first album to do so in 2015. In the United States, the album became the band's second number one on the Billboard 200, debuting at number one with sales of 231,000 copies, or 249,000 units including tracks sales and streams. Furthermore, the band marked the largest debut for a rock album in 2015 and the third-biggest opening overall of the year. The album has sold 568,000 copies in the US as of May 2016.

wikipedia.org
 

 L y r i c s


Currently no Lyrics available!

 M P 3   S a m p l e s


Currently no Samples available!