And so they beat on, boats mumbling and shuffling against the past.
[Video][Website]
[3.56]
Will Adams: Amazingly, the stadium is a better setting for them than the campfire.
[6]
Mo Kim: Okay, look. There are covers of “Little Lion Man” I still enjoy. I’d probably hoedown to “I Will Wait” if I heard it while waiting in line in Walgreens. But I never listened to Mumford & Sons for the brofound sentiments they probably jotted down from aesthetic blogs five minutes before entering the studio: I listened because there was an urgency that resonated with me, that at times even lifted the music into the realm of the life-affirming. “Believe,” on the other hand, is about as life-affirming an experience as listening to a drunk person on the subway yelling whenever you try to discreetly change seats. The lyrics aren’t as bad as they were before: they get worse. I do not know what this song is even trying to say. The chorus conceit is that the singer doesn’t know if he believes what you’re trying to tell him but then he demands that you tell him that he’s alive and you love him! All of this gross selfishness is wrapped in verses that read like My Baby’s First Existential Crisis and a halfhearted stab at Coldplay soundscapes, as if a rise in volume can make up for a dearth of ideas.
[2]
Mark Sinker: Turns out I’m not intrinsically hostile to a debanjofied M&S sped-up gliding across and through London’s bridges and tunnels late at night, especially when they plunge through my beloved Rotherhithe. Consequence: not the worst pull-the-stops-out spacerock guitar break you’ll ever hear. Except I was doing a lot of this kind of driving this winter, from Beckenham to Hackney and back, and of course it’s the opposite of a sped-up neon-city ride mostly, and one night my spectacle lens fell out as I drove and I couldn’t find the little micro-screw in the dark and had to repair it till I got home with fresh-chewed chewing gum. A sub-optimal dimension to the trope that no one (not even Night Flights-era Scott Walker) has explored. And the Mumfords would never think to move beyond the easy-reach cliché. Also, when watching the video again, spot the times they had to splice several bits of glide in a second time, and everything just deflates.
[4]
Micha Cavaseno: It should be noted that a U2-style guitar overloaded with chorus and an organ being the only instrumentation at the beginning of this Mumford song is revolutionary in their Luddite musical world. But, ah, then the song kicks off and I remember it’s another Mumford & Sons song.
[4]
Luisa Lopez: What Mumford & Sons does best is earnest faux folk, the promise of feeling with the potential of melodrama. Feigning acoustic when their hearts beat rock, they become an easy passage into sentiment, a way to unleash a torrent of muchness with the belief that nothing before has ever brought it out quite like this. The folk affect is the point, the reason they rose out of the ashes of mopey guy rock as if they were the only phoenix burdened with poetry. Without that, there’s not much else to see so if nothing else this song at least bears witness to the perils of pulling back the curtain.
[4]
Alfred Soto: Fine — I’ll say you’re alive if you shut up, and this includes your guitar solo.
[2]
Edward Okulicz: So there was this mostly terrible Australian band called Powderfinger, we did them on the Jukebox once. This sounds more or less like Mumford have broadened their sights and range just enough to be mid-period Powderfinger, when they were merely “awful”. God love them, they probably thought Coldplay, but no. Not even Snow Patrol. Keep trying, boys. What’s here is an improvement on what was there before, because in getting a bit brasher and blustery (if aimlessly so) they’ve at least jettisoned their third-least irritating characteristic. Their hyper-earnest, anaemic songwriting and faux-motional mushy singing, alas, remain.
[1]
Katherine St Asaph: Little Marc Mumford, much to his comfort, made bluegrass and still got airplay. Along came Adult Hits, i.a. OneRepublic, to chase all the bluegrass away.
[5]
Scott Mildenhall: Is that it? The sole interesting point was checking whether the abrasive, 64kbps mp3-esque watery crackle was a result of poor quality playback, and incredibly, it’s actually on the record. What isn’t is any palpable urgency, instead only an assumption that you’ll find it. If they wanted to mix things up a bit they should have just got Robin Schulz or Wankelmut to produce them something and had done with it.
[4]