Winki Roundup: Avett Brothers / Portugal. The Man / Múm / Sunn O)))

Let's take a glimpse at some of the few-months-old releases that we didn't find time enough to write about them. Scroll a bit lower to get your tunes:

It would be too unfair to dismiss Avett Brothers new album I And Love And You this early in the game, but the reason I have forgotten about them only two weeks after having them on my media library’s “New But Fresh” playlist is that their 2007’s Emotionalism was probably too good and now they’re bound to sound better and we anticipate nothing less. Seth and Scott Avett decidedly have chosen their reflecting and longer tracks on the first half of the disk and the witty and danceable ones on the second. For an avid Avett fan, it would be just alright to wait a while to have his/her first favorite hit on the disk which is “And It Spread” and then lose their minds as they did on Emotionalism in tracks like “Die, Die, Die” and “Will You Return”, with witty, funky but soulful quick-growers a la “Kick Drum Heart” and “Slight Figure of Speech”. So in the end, I would be sad to call I And Love And You a moderate country/blue-grass/folk album. These guys can bring back a handful of classic country memories on each song.

The Satanic Satanist is the new effort by Portugal. the Man (yeah with a dot) who comes from Alaska and contains a considerable amount of well-nourished pop-rock tunes that instantly make you believe “Wow! Now it hits the right spot in my mind!” and for some folks who enjoy short-lived jams, it actually does. The 11 track collection is a delicious back to back line-up of pop-rock tunes that segue into each other. The band was formerly known as Anatomy of a Ghost till they came up with this new wtf moniker. And if you still can’t get enough there’s a special addition of the album tangled up with a second disk that includes the acoustic version of….THE WHOLE ALBUM (named The Majestic Majesty). The album could be phenomenal if only it wasn’t some 15 years late in release date. Although Portugal. The Man categorize themselves as experimental rock, I can merely say the hardworking indie rockers have elevated their tasty melodic talents, but unluckily the album will not last for a long while on your lists. The starter “People Say” however, is a tuneful and delicious short pop song.

By the start of the new millennium, Icelandic acts revived their alien-ish nature thanks to delicate sounds of bands such as Sigur Rós and Múm. Sigur Rós though, when it came to going off the beaten path carefully decided that Alexi, the lead singer should go and have his solo work and that was what happened this year. Múm didn’t. After promising nightly beauties found on earlier works like 2000’s Yesterday Was Dramatic, Today Is OK, 2002’s Finally We Are No One or even 2004’s Summer Make Good something gloomy indeed challenged the band. Sadly, Summer Make Good was the last satisfying Múm album. The departure of the Valtýsdóttir twin sisters Gyða and Kristín led to the vanishing of the ghostly sound of the band. The glitch instrumentation was amp-d for the band’s 2007’s album Go Go Smear the Poison Ivy. The outcome was nothing but hopeless and sparse. When the light that once blossomed your music is out, apparently there’s nothing you can do to compensate even if you make a replica of the good ol' you. Múm returned this year in August with Sing Along To Songs You Don’t Know only to make things worse. Despite Gunnar Örn Tynes and Örvar Þóreyjarson Smárason’s attempts to bring the good ol’ glockenspiel lullabies back, the album is void of all the beauty that once charmed us.

There used to be various metal subgenres: thrash, doom, black, Christian, crust punk, neo-classical or sludge. And I can mostly name one band from each shelf, but Sunn O))) happens to be a drone doom metal act, or let’s simply call it drone. No it’s not a new trend in the genre, it’s me that’s come across this deviation a bit late. Inherently, specific aspects of metal scares the shit out of me and for the rest of the story I try to avoid the whole issue, but reading about drone on internet, I figured it fortunately lacks a great deal of annoying vibrations that similar subgenres have and gradually stop a non-metal fan like me from digging any deeper into the fiend funeral ground. As written in Wikipedia “Doom metal is an extreme form of heavy metal music that typically uses very slow tempos, low-tuned guitars and a much 'thicker' or 'heavier' sound than other metal genres.” Trying the 7th studio work from the twosome Monoliths & Dimensions, I have to admit I slowly let this dismal otherworldly fear overcome me and that was the sole way I could relate to it. The band is led by Stephen O’Malley and there are 4 haunting drone ballads on the disk and is one of the year’s favorite albums by Metacritic. As for the voice you are surprisingly not dealing with a shrieking demon. Instead it’s O’Malley’s near-death vampire voice who, in a spoken-word manner of singing discusses cryptic riddles of the supernatural. The second track called “Big Church” which happens to be the shortest piece of music found on Monoliths, also has a second name and I guess I leave you with that: “Megszentségteleníthetetlenségeskedéseitekért”!

[mp3] Avett Brothers "And It Spread"
[mp3] Portugal. The Man "People Say"
[mp3] Múm "Last Shapes of Never"
[mp3] Sunn O))) "Big Church"

* Buy Avett Brothers I And Love And You / Portugal. The Man's The Satanic Satanist / Múm's Sing Along To Songs You Don't Know / Sunn O)))'s Monoliths & Dimensions