Mumford & Sons, “Sigh No More”(Glass Note)
How explosive is this British banjo rager of a record? It’s so potent that old folkies are learning to use iTunes for the first time — and they’re not alone. “Sigh No More” just unseated Susan Boyle’s “I Dreamed a Dream” as the No. 1 record in Australia, and the positive reviews in the States and U.K. are pouring in.
Count this among those. I saw Mumford & Sons twice at the South by Southwest music festival last year, and they presented that rare mixture of raw emotion, expert musicianship and compelling songs masterfully. The Avett Brothers comparisons are easy, especially with this band’s love of ballads.
But this group has a darker bent, reveling in apocalyptic sounds and dramatic wordsmithing. On “Dust Bowl Blues,” the piano and banjo duel to the death. “White Blank Page” is a beautifully bitter track that thrives on chamber pop flourishes. And “The Cave,” a song that has been the band’s signature track for more than a year, is an undeniable jam that would fit as solidly on KBCO as it would on the stages of the Telluride Bluegrass Festival, where Mumford & Sons will make their Colorado debut this summer. Ricardo Baca
Massive Attack, “Heligoland”(Virgin)
Massive Attack may not sound all that revolutionary these days, but when the band first broke out of Bristol, England, in 1991, the music pioneers were at the forefront of the new genre called trip-hop. Nearly 20 years on, the group — now essentially a duo with rotating guest vocalists — is suffering the fate of many of its peers, which is that the bands influenced by Massive Attack (from rock to electronic) are producing more interesting work than the band itself.
“Heligoland,” Massive’s fifth studio album, is ambitious. It ropes in vocalists from the arty dance-rock (TV on the Radio’s Tunde Adebimpe) and pop fields (Damon Albarn of Gorillaz and Blur) to more sultry styles (longtime collaborator Martina Topley-Bird). It’s a dense album, packed with production tricks and details that appear only through close, repeated listens.
But the overall effect is mild and sleepy, and save for a couple of quiet stunners (“Paradise Circus,” “Saturday Come Slow”) it fails to offer anything smacking of inventiveness — which is a shame, since originality used to be this group’s strong suit. John Wenzel
