Múm — Early Birds

After two and a half decades of concert-going, Múm remains one of two shows from which I’ve ever walked out. They were touring the U.S. on the heels of their commercial peak, Finally We Are No One, at the humid heights of summer, and the small club at which they were performing was uncomfortably packed and may have had broken air conditioning. I have no qualms about sweating at shows, but usually it’s because the band have generated a fervid frenzy amongst its crowd; in this case Múm were listless, precious, and deliberate, trying to recreate songs that all seemed to have “swimming pool” in the title while being completely unaware of the horrible irony. Midway into the show, around midnight, a friend of mine mentioned frozen grapes and cold drinks back at her apartment, and the Múm live experience—intertwined with my fandom—became history.

Early Birds collects tracks that predate Múm’s landmark first album, Yesterday Was Dramatic - Today Is OK, while illustrating why the band at its peak felt important enough that so many of us wanted to see them in intolerable conditions back in the day. The band emerged with its “everything but the kitchen sink” approach to electronic music already intact, and proceeded to bridge the gap between the 1990s techno climate and the 2000s indie scene.

This collection is really made up of three distinct parts. The first is a 4-track cassette demo with canned techno-circa-1997 breakbeats and analogue synth sounds; while the four tracks are mostly indistinguishable, they will be both palatable and welcomed by all but the most discerning Warp Records fan. One of these (“Gingúrt”) features an accordion and, according to the indispensable booklet of surprisingly humorous anecdotes that describes and explains each track, was recorded on the street to reproduce a distinctly European “live band” feel; it therefore stands out more than the others.

The triumvirate of collaborations and remixes that follows comprises the album’s middle passage, and hints at the indie pop direction the band would eventually take. The Músíkvatur remix of the demo tape’s “Bak Þitt Er Sem Rennibraut” features a fuzzy guitar riff that culminates in an extended, trebly solo: it’s entirely uncharacteristic and yet still manages to be upstaged by some neoclassical female vocal sample that has nothing to do with the childlike warbling from one Valtýsdóttir twin (or the other) that would eventually overtake and redefine the band. “Insert Coin” likewise is a Múm cover of Músíkvatur’s song, made their own with a brief humming vocal break that qualifies as the first absolutely gorgeous moment on the album.

The latter half of Early Birds is really the part that gets the worm: a suite of ambient pieces intended for plays and poetry readings, or just plain outtakes meant to document aspects of the band’s evolution, such as their move to Berlin where they hooked up with Morr Music and established themselves internationally. Fans of Yesterday Was Dramatic - Today Is OK will find much to like here, not least of which is the ten-minute “Enginn Vildi Hlusta Á Fiðlunginn, Því Strengir Hans Vóru Slitnir”—by far the most engaging piece that Múm has ever recorded. With this extended experiment, founders Gunnar Örn Tynes and Örvar Þóreyjarson Smárason, who are still the core of the band today, curate an impossible melange of sounds (sampled conversation, humming, accordion drone, violin, environmental field recordings, etc.) into a single shifting thread of majestic aura. The alternate timeline on which Múm produces numerous longform pieces like this unfortunately remains a fantasy.

Instead, the baby nap-time lullabies of indie pop Múm remain right around the corner. “Hufeland” acts as a ghost of this future, the sound of breakbeats in a sleepy blanket thrown over trance. Written after Yesterday Was Dramatic, it earns its place in Múm’s repertoire now but was abandoned at the time, possibly because it’s not quite precious enough.

Múm peaked right when they should have. After a run as indie pop scenesters, where the twin girls graced Belle & Sebastian album covers and one of them would run off and marry/divorce Avey Tare from Animal Collective, they mutated into more of an organic-sounding minstrel collective akin to Efterklang or Sigur Rós. But this compilation represents a time before all that. For a moment at the turn of the millennium, they were a fully formed and critically individual electronic art band that nailed a form of wistful nostalgia that sounded like adults remembering and revering childhood rather than their later guise of being stuck in it.