Friday, August 14, 2009

Quite A Mouthful

Artist: Mew
Album: No More Stories... (see below)
Year: 2009
Grade: 2.5 pretzels

For the record, this album’s full title is as follows

No More Stories
Are Told Today
I’m Sorry
They Washed Away

No More Stories
The World Is Grey
I’m Tired
Let’s Wash Away

Yup, that entire thing is the title, which has been conveniently boiled down to No More Stories… by the music press, so that music journalists the world over don’t lose their minds. This insanely overblown spectacle of a title should tell you something about Mew, an incredibly odd “pretentious art rock” band (their words, not mine) hailing from the vibrant musical hotbed of...Denmark? Yup, Denmark. Go figure.

Mew’s sound sits somewhere between the soaring beauty of Sigur Ros and the horrible, overwrought excesses of, say, Yes. Or Emerson, Lake And Palmer. In fact, pick any of those ridiculous 70s progressive rock bands and you can hear a bit of their influence in Mew. At the same time though, you can hear much more modern, hip influences coursing through the same songs. It’s an odd pairing and can lead to quite a bit of musical confusion in the mind of whichever poor listener stumbles upon a Mew record.

No More Stories… continues all of these trends, building on the humongous sound Mew solidified on 2005’s And The Glass Handed Kites (they really need to work on their titles). Spiky rockers like “Introducing Palace Players” and “Repeaterbeater” is counterbalanced with inane sonic oddities, like the opening “New Terrain”, which has a hidden song in it that can be heard when played backwards. I was under the impression that people got over the whole “backmasking” thing in the 70s, or, at latest, after Tipper Gore’s shitfit about it in the 80s. Apparently, Mew never got that memo.

It’d be really easy to dismiss Mew as a group of prog-rock loving Danes who are trying way, way too hard. Yet, every once and while, they’ll unearth a passage in a song that’s just fantastic. No More Stories… has a handful of these, including parts of the Flaming-Lips-but-more-so intro to “Sometimes Life Isn’t Easy” and the hushed closing track, “Reprise”. Both of these find Mew behaving more like an unusually bizarre incarnation of Coldplay than a modern prog-rock band, which is a change I can deal with. However, No More Stories… still features an unbearable, seven-and-half minute centerpiece titled “Cartoons And Macremé Wounds”. Mew are asking a lot of their listeners with music this over-the-top. Perhaps too much.

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