Album Review: Mumford and Sons, "Sigh No More"

This is one CD that I've had in my collection ever since it was given to me by a promoter back in 2010. I listened to it a bit and remembered hearing the name when the band started to become a bit famous, and I kind of see why they might appeal to some people. But the fact is their sound never appealed to me.

In fact the only reason I decided to listen to it again is because I have too many CDs and DVDs for my folders, and basically I want to chuck something out. So, I decided to see if this was worth keeping or not.

First of all, I couldn't really get into it song by song, so I kind of had it on as background music. But it doesn't really work as that either and becomes a bit irritating more than anything.

While some of the songs showed melodic talent and musicianship, they were basically rather "samey." I would characterise the sound as "boisterous depression," which is a kind of paradox, and all the more irritating for that.

Looking at the period they straddle with their fame, I can't help seeing them as a kind of "Hipster" music, part of that whole "fake authenticity" culture of baristas, bicycles, beards and tattoos.

The music itself is full of suitably retro flourishes. For example the first single -- and thus one of the stronger tracks (but samey nonetheless) -- "Little Lion Man" meshes banjos with the choral harmonies the band do to death elsewhere.

Really, this stuff, while clearly not talentless, just grates after a while.

While face fuzz abounds (all four members seem to have beards) this is the sound of a Britain that has lost its balls.

For those still wondering whether I bothered to keep the disc in my collection -- perhaps as a oddity or artefact of the doomed hipster culture -- wonder no more. It is now acquiring true authenticity as part of some landfill somewhere.

Colin Liddell
Revenge of Riff Raff
22nd of May, 2018

Revenge...?

Riff Raff was a legendary rock magazine based in London in the late 1980s and 1990s. Edited by the ultimate music biz insider, Mark Crampton, and employing such talents as Mark Blake, Jerry Ewing, Mike Harris, Paul Smith, Chris Collingwood, Alan McCrorie, Simon Robinson, Lyn Guy, Anna Marx, Nick Douglas, Marion Garden, Peter "Grunty" Grant, Joe "The Crow" Mackett, Billy "The Kluck" Kulke, and, lastest and mostest, the incredible Liddell Brothers, Mark (a.k.a. "El Perro") and Colin (a.k.a. "Der Fly"). Unfortunately, Riff Raff was just too R n' R for its own good. A genuine working class rock mag, written, edited, and translated into 16 European languages in a drug-N-Jack-D-fuelled haze, often on the back of motorbikes, with spell checking by our staff of attentive rock bimbos (chosen purely for their blondeness and big knockers), it soon fell behind more trainspotterly, nerdish, and politically correct publications like Q, Kerrang, Mojo, Metal Hammer, and Horse & Hound. This website is an archive and kind of shrine dedicated to the writing of its greatest writers, some of whom, luckily for the Rock Kosmos, still continue to write about music. This is the REVENGE of Riff Raff...Rock on!