Mumford & Sons – Sigh No More (Gentlemen Of The Road/Island Records)

OOF. I love this. I love it! I love Love LOVE it! I’m winded by my love for it! OOF!

I seem to be one of the few people who hadn’t heard Mumford & Sons before: oops. Ah well, I don’t care. I reckon this was the best way to discover them. A Whole Album In My Ears! Oh, it was wonderful! It completely engulfed me! I very rarely like the entirety of an album (does anyone?) but having listened to this over and over, looking for weak points, I’m just too blinded by love for it all to see any. Mumford and I are in our honeymoon period and there’s nothing I can do about that.

Hum. How to explain my love? Perhaps The Cave is a good example to start with. Squeaky strummy guitar, the gravelled voice, the heroic banjo sprints, and a touch of background ‘aa-aaah’ing. It swept me away! I felt the way Kate Bush looks: a frantic romantic, galloping along in a red velvet frock, hair flying out behind me…Yeah. I know. But then Winter Winds came along to save me from myself. Hello trumpet! Hello cymbals! Come on in, oh do!

My brain kept shouting “hooray” and then I had that thing where your heart soars so much it gets a bit stuck in your throat and makes you want to cry. Cough. Such an inspired mixture of instruments: why do I not hear mile-a-minute banjo strumming alongside a trumpet harmony more often? And the gravelly scrapy voice to bring it back to reality: such an important and intelligent combination. With a sweet, pure voice I might have puked at all this (there’s a fine line between love and hate…). These guys Know What They Are Doing. Oh!

SOARING. It soared and I flew along with them, waving frantically. AND THEN THEY RAGED on White Blank Page and how how I felt the injustice. I felt everything, man. Yum yum yum to strength of character and serious, bold, bare emotion.

The opening of Dust Bowl Dance brought to mind some of the comics of Chris Ware (how d’ya like that, huh? ). A piano opens and we hear “The young man stands on the edge of his porch/the days were short/and the father was gone/there was no-one in the town and no-one in the field/this dusty barren land had given all it could yield…” And then…let it build…RARGH! MORE RAGE! Hooray! I’m with you, boys.

Moments before we’d had Awake My Soul which was almost medieval, almost reminiscent of the rhythm of nursery rhymes. That’s the key, I think: that it all feels like it’s been around forever, it’s old fashioned and wise and yet apparently they’re only in their early twenties. Precocious bastards (JOKE). This is proper, you know what I mean? Proper music that has been in the souls of humans for centuries, forever, telling stories, sharing histories. Real emotion, real thought, real humanity. Argh.

Sigh No More, they say. After I’ve collected my courage and collected my horse I’ll be sighing for these chaps for a long time.

Joy Thomas