Mumford and Sons Vs Muse: Replication and Exploration

Last year, two albums were released within a week of each other from two of the UK’s biggest bands. Both Mumford & Sons’ second album Babel and Muse’s sixth studio album The 2nd Law topped the charts, while polarising certain critics in the process.

Mumford & Sons’ rise to the pinnacles of British music has been a swift one. Their 2009 debut Sigh No More was praised for its anthemic melodies, raw spirit and energy, and intellectually challenging lyrics. Energetic live performances and much discussion about the meaning of their lyrics ensued, ensuring that the follow up was widely anticipated. The album was arguably an even bigger success, recently winning a Grammy Award for the Best Album of 2012. However, at first listen I couldn’t really discern anything that would distinguish the album from its predecessor. The themes of faith, struggles with religion and search for truth were still the main focus of the lyrics, which also featured references to literature. The album even contained one song which contained the f-word, identical to the 2009 debut. “Below My Feet” could be argued to deal with the pressure of fame and the wish to stay grounded, but apart from this, any of the songs could have featured on Sigh No More quite comfortably.

Muse’s sixth studio album was bound to be a success. The first five albums combined with their stadium-filling stage performances had cemented their status as one of Britain’s best loved, and most highly regarded bands. However, some of the bands fans were left confused by news that the band would be dabbling in dubstep to find a new sound for the new album. Each album Muse has released has a slightly separate sound. The band’s fifth album received mixed reviews but the final three songs on the album, the three part “Exogenesis Symphony”, was widely praised.

As a listener, I really enjoyed both Babel and The 2nd Law. As much as I loved Mumford and Sons’ first album, there is only so many times you can listen to an album before the power and emotion become, to an extent, part of the furniture of the album, as the rawness has the edge taken from it. Thus, having an extra 12 tracks (plus three bonus tracks) to add to the collection was a blessing. The album is just as consistent, and just as deep as the first and wasn’t taken out of my stereo for a very long time. However, for me to want to listen to the album, I have to be in the “Mumford and Sons Mood”, and I could listen quite happily to either album the band has released. In short, I am probably in love with the band more so than the album itself. In terms of Muse’s catalogue, there’s a range of sounds, moods and atmospheres to choose from, meaning that I could probably listen to them more consistently than I could Mumford and Sons.

There has been a history of bands changing their sound after finding mainstream success. After Radiohead’s 1997 masterpiece Ok Computer, which many described as “one of the great guitar albums” the follow up, Kid A, couldn’t have been much different if they tried. Instead of the guitar driven sounds, the band delved into electronic music, yet still managed to create a masterpiece. The band had initially confused many fans, but won many new fans with the release of Kid A. In a 2008 interview frontman Thom Yorke said that he was slowly returning to the use of the guitars because he felt that his lack of experience on piano was beginning to show; however, he stated that he was still “still quite bored with guitars, hence my obsession with the piano.”

Radiohead frontman Thom Yorke changed the band’s style on account of being “bored”.

American musician Sufjan Stevens, well known for his eccentric style and angel wing costume, often explores different styles with different albums, and it is possibly the fact that each new album starts as a completely blank canvas which makes him so compelling to follow. His 2005 album Illinois was supposedly the start of a project which would finish with an album for each state of America. After scrapping this plan, he next produced an album with the concept of being a film score for the Brooklyn Queens Expressway, with many orchestral arrangements. His most recent album is an electronic album which is very eclectic and sometimes difficult to listen to. Despite the fact that each album contains a very different style they all contain melodies which can be identified as Steven’s own, thus acting as his signature on each project.

But many artists, and their fans, are perfectly happy to find “their sound” and stick to it. Variation from album to album doesn’t necessarily mean that the artist is a more talented musician, simply more versatile. Many modern day blues artists change very little from album to album, with guitar legend Joe Bonamassa churning out a solo album almost annually knowing full well that his fans will buy the album. I saw Bonamassa at the Echo Arena last year and was blown away by his talent. Replication of Bonamassa’s sound is by no means a bad thing, but even he explores different sounds through his involvement in supergroup Black Country Communion, and last year released a duet of old blues and soul covers, very different to his existing material, with Beth Hart.

After the release of Babel, Marcus Mumford was quoted by NME as saying: “We’ve always done what feels good, rather than what we’ve thought long and hard about, and we’ll do whatever feels soulful next, whether that’s with an electric guitar or a synthesizer.” But the band could well explore different sounds with their next album, with Ben Lovett saying “we do have greater ambitions not to just stay within certain sonic confines”. Perhaps this shows that the true musician is an explorer, and won’t simply release the same album over and over.

What would you prefer from your favourite artists? Replication of the sound you first listened to them for, or exploration of different sounds?

Jake Bugg: The Next Bob Dylan?

In the October of last year, Jake Bugg, an 18 year old from a council estate in Nottingham, released his self-titled debut album to instant acclaim. The album went to the top of the charts and many, both critics and members of the public, marked Bugg out to be the “antidote” to manufactured pop and the “next Bob Dylan “, with Bugg himself citing his influences as Dylan, Hendrix, The Beatles, Johnny Cash and Donovan.

Being marked out as the next Bob Dylan must certainly add a lot of pressure to the process of making an album, but it must also be a hugely honouring and encouraging thing too! On the one hand a lot is expected of Bugg, meaning he has to try and please people and not just make songs as he pleases, but on the other hand it shows that people believe in him, surely giving him confidence to put material out there.

Bob Dylan, the musician who Bugg is often compared to.

Bugg’s voice and song-writing skills are of someone much older than 18 years of age, but so are his image and lyrics. He looks like a nouveau mod and claims to have “seen it all”. He seems to be trying meticulously to go against the grain of all that is popular, and has ironically gained huge popularity in doing so. The second single from the album, “Country Song”, was used to advertise Greene King IPA, marking Bugg as someone who respects tradition and history, in a time when most 18 year olds are drinking shots at night-clubs.

Jake Bugg is certainly talented, and in many ways it could be argued that he is the antidote to the many indistinguishable manufactured artists that are ruling the music scene at the moment. When Justin Bieber (who has gained fame as much for his image and personal life as for his music) is the name that springs to mind when mentioning young music talent, Jake Bugg definitely becomes an interesting alternative. His lyrics have substance, and his music is special. It would be so very easy for a young musician to just fall into the mould of an image-driven young pop star, which Bugg has avoided doing. However, it could be argued that Bugg is just as constrained by comparisons to Bob Dylan as by the mould of a young pop star. He may not have followed the crowd of vain young musicians obsessed about their image, but he may have fallen into a mould nonetheless. Whereas musicians such as Bjork are unique, and follow their own artistic desires, Bugg is trying to follow the artistic desires of artists from the 1960s.

Image of Jake Bugg. It looks like an attempt to channel the spirit of The Beatles, who were also pictured in working class areas

The Beatles, one of Bugg’s influences

So is Jake Bugg just as manufactured as the artists he is so desperate do distinguish himself from? Bugg recently made the news for slating One Direction, saying that they are “terrible”, and upon his album topping the charts, said that it was his job to “keep that X Factor s*** off the top of the charts”. Bugg is trying so hard to single himself out as being “old school” that seems like an angry child who just tries not to follow the current crowd for the sake of being different. There’s nothing wrong with being different, but it seems to me like Bugg is still trying to follow a crowd, just the crowd from 50 years ago. It is possible that Bugg has become manufactured, but just by people who are disillusioned with the music industry as it currently lies. Like the child who doesn’t like his vegetables purely because they are vegetables, Bugg has decided that popularity with masses can be a repulsive thing, seemingly ignorant of his own popularity. Maybe he sees his own popularity as an admission that today’s music simply isn’t good enough?

Jake Bugg is hugely talented, and his debut album is a breath of fresh air. Particular highlights are the second single “Country Song”, “Two Fingers”, which tells of Buggs time in the Nottingham council estate Clifton and the pained song “Someone Told Me”. However, is there a point where all the hype, and being marked out as”the next big thing” can actually put restraints on a musician and limit their freedom to make their own music?

The Personal Life of the Musician

John Mayer’s 2006 album Continuum was one of the first albums which I listened to and allowed to speak to me. For a long time I had listened to music and enjoyed the experience but had not been affected by what I listened to; this changed when I started listening to John Mayer. It wasn’t as such that I needed a song to speak some wise words to me, but Mayer’s lyrics seemed to be concerned with the human condition and emotions more than any artist I had been listening to before. John Mayer is one of the most talked about musicians in the music scene, from his womanising ways to his interview with Rolling Stone in 2010, which was deemed to be racist. Mayer is an artist whose music is a key to his life, and his lyrics conceal nothing from the listener. On his 2009 album Battle Studies Mayer makes references to his much talked about relationship with Jennifer Aniston, saying “I’m an assassin and I had a job to do, little did I know that girl was an assassin too”. There’s an air of liberation in the openness with which Mayer acknowledges that he is a shallow man, or an “assassin” yet he tars Aniston with the same brush. Furthermore, he has had an on-going feud with Taylor Swift, who wrote the song “Dear John” about Mayer after their short-lived relationship.

John Mayer photographed in 2012

Music and literature are often compared and viewed in a similar light. Bob Dylan is often referred to as a “poet” and Mumford and Sons frontman Marcus Mumford has recently stated that the band’s second album is littered with references to novels. In the same way that we learn about musicians by listening to their music, it could be argued that we can learn about authors from their writings. However, in 1967, French literary critic and theorist Roland Barthes wrote an essay called “The Death of the Author” in which he argued that the author should be considered as completely unrelated to their work, and that the author should remain aloof from their creation. He argued that “To give the text an Author is to impose a limit on that text”. Critics have since discussed whether the author’s life and experience should be considered when reading a novel, but what should we do when it comes to music? Would the songs we listen to lose some of their supposed “meaning” if we were to ignore the personal lives or intentions of the artist?

John Mayer epitomizes this confliction between wanting to both associate a work to its creator yet enjoy it as an entity on its own. Despite the fact that his lyrics tell the listener an awful lot about his life, he himself appears to struggle with the reputation he has gained stemming from peoples fascination with his life. In an interview for his 2008 live album Where The Light Is he said: “That’s the thing about people knowing anything about you before you meet them. You to work just to get them back to knowing nothing about you. It would take me an hour to ease someone’s mind into knowing nothing about me from thinking they know something about me”. Here Mayer bemoans the insight his songs seem to give into his life, and the fact that people think that through listening to these songs they know the man who wrote them.

Another great example of music being intertwined with personal lives is Fleetwood Mac’s album Rumours, which is an album charting the love lives of those in the band. “You Make Loving Fun” is a song inspired by Christine McVie’s affair with the lighting director Curry Grant, when married to bassist John McVie. Rumours is a classic album, selling over 30 million copies. It could be argued that part of the album’s success is because of the complicated lives of Fleetwood Mac’s band members, and the publicity that this lends to the album.

It seems that the way in which most songs incorporate lyrics with music intensifies the effect with which we feel a song’s message. Novels can capture a feeling, emotion or situation, but songs can further that emotion by creating a mood with music. However, should treat music any different to the way in which we read a novel? Should we view the songs an artist produces as a doorway into their life, or should we take Roland Barthe’s approach and consider the creator and created as two separate entities?

Music and Literature by Willian Michael Harnett (1878)

The Demise of the Music Shop

A record shop closing down

Recently I was walking to get the train into the centre of Liverpool, and by the train station I saw that a vinyl shop had opened. A few weeks later I went to get the train again and noticed that the shop had been replaced by a card shop. The shop’s life was far too short and far too lonely, and its death made next to no impact on the local area. While the owner was desperately trying to sell the vinyl’s that he had grown up listening to, his potential clients were sat at computers in houses surrounding his outcast shop downloading songs to their iPods. Online music seems to be conquering the high street cd shop, and it appears that it is only a matter of time before music completely disappears from our shops, and is imprisoned in the digital world. Hilco’s impending purchase of HMV’s 230 stores seems to have ensured that, at least for now, the high-street music seller isn’t completely closed, but how long can we really expect to be able to walk into a shop and buy cds?

Now I believe it would be foolish to simply argue the case that the availability of music online is abhorrent to music lovers. The internet allows the music lover access to many more artists encompassing more genres than their local record store can. You would be hard pressed to find a music lover who has not enjoyed the benefits of the internet to find new artists and learn about existing favourites, so to accuse the internet of ruining the music industry would be to have our cake and eat it too. The internet allows artists to get widespread recognition for their work a stage for smaller artists to get their music heard. In their early days the Dave Matthews Band gained quite a following in universities where fans would trade recordings from live concerts. Many artists allow recordings at concerts in order to allow fans to view the concert online. In 2010 I saw John Mayer live at the Manchester Apollo, having bought all of his albums and live recordings. A couple of days later I found that someone had put a good quality audio recording of the concert online. I was delighted! Concerts are often special nights so having a permanent copy of the concert is definitely a good thing. In summary, the internet can be a great tool to use for people who are already buying CDs and who will continue to do so.

But when our love of music is outweighed by our greed then downloading seems to become a problem. The presence of music online can be a great thing, but when it becomes too readily available it become a bit of a commodity, and we stop thinking of all that goes into the process of making a song; we forget that there’s much more to mixing an album than simply recording in one go.

HMV entered administration in January 2013

One of the main reasons for my sadness at the potential closure of HMV is my belief that, usually, when we download, we know exactly what we are going to get, and it’s often artists which we know all about anyway. We download the odd song when we’ve heard it before, or albums from tried and trusted artists. Downloading music from the internet is like going on a regimented bus journey, where the destination is decided upon. But we’ve stopped going to the cd shop to browse, which is like going on a spontaneous road trip in the car not knowing where we’ll end up.

Each year, a couple of days after Christmas I would go for a walk with my family in Llandudno, then visit HMV on the way home and look for a CD. Some of my favourite albums have been impulse purchases, albums which I haven’t heard before but which have been recommended by a friend or which have an enticing cover. There was always a magic about getting an album just to see what it was like. If the album was good, then it felt like I had made a new discovery. And it was my own discovery. Personally, I find that downloading music takes away a little bit of that magic, takes away the spontaneity and romance about buying music.

Furthermore, it seems to me like the CD will die out an awful lot quicker than the DVD. Supermarkets stock more DVDs than CDs, and the music section in some of the smaller HMVs seems to be engulfed by the DVD section. I believe this could well be because of the way we now think about music. Synchronising music to our iPods means that we can take it anywhere we like, and so we can walk down the street or sit on the bus and block out the world by plugging our headphones in so that nobody tries to talk to us. Where we would sit down with our friends in front of the television and watch a DVD, we don’t sit down by our speakers and listen to music. Perhaps part of the problem is that our love for music has meant that we want to be constantly connected to it, but whereas you cannot carry a television down the road to watch a film, it has become too easy, and too much of an individual activity to listen to our favourite songs, detracting from their value and lessening the romance of finding a great band. Before music became commercially available, you might have only heard your favourite symphony a few times in your life, but wouldn’t that just heighten the excitement each time you hear it?

Perhaps the demise of music shops is a good thing, as in losing the high street music store we might rediscover the romance about buying music, as we will realise the importance of a physical space for music lovers to congregate and share their hobby.

A family listening to the radio in the 1950s

Owen Campbell’s Australia’s Got Talent Audition: Music as a Product

The 2012 run of The X Factor was considered unsuccessful when looking at the viewing figures. An average of 8.2 million viewers tuned in each week to watch members of the public aspiring to be pop stars sing in front of four judges who have been successful in the music industry.

Talent shows are popular all the world over, with around 40 different countries airing their own versions of the X Factor, along with other talent shows such as Britain’s Got Talent. Many contestants appear on the show starry eyed, enamoured with the world of celebrity and desperate to become famous themselves, and you can search on Youtube for hundreds of “amazing” performances, however one performance on the 2012 Australia’s Got Talent stood out to me particularly and got me thinking.

28 year old blues guitarist Owen Campbell caused quite a stir when he took on the judges, infuriating Westlife singer Brian Mcfadden with the sarcastic words “my aim isn’t to be in a boy band, chief”. Furthermore, Campbell mistook Kyle Sandilands name for “Karl” and cheekily remarked that seeing Dannii Minogue was “a pleasure, as always.” The judges sent Campbell packing, before he supposedly apologised to the show and went through to the next round after his second audition.

When critiquing Owen’s performance, Brian Mcfadden remarked that “to be in this industry you gotta have smarts”, adding that “if you act like an arse people aren’t going to like you”. Dannii Minogue asked the question: “At 28, why is it that you’re that talented and you haven’t made it yet”, as though his choice to busk and travel must mean that there is something wrong with him. A few minutes earlier Owen Campbell had moved the crowd to their feet with a great performance, yet the judges sent him home for a reason that had nothing to do with the musical performance he had given. What were they judging Campbell on then? This got me thinking: it’s obvious that if someone is going to be difficult to work with then they will struggle to get a record deal, but is a musical act really about the music anymore, or has the music just become a small part of a bigger product? In short, how much of a role does the actual sound of the music play in influencing what we decide to listen to?

It seems to me that the physical music is becoming less and less important to us as consumers. Musicians are closely watched and their personal lives scrutinised, and there’s an expectation for pop musicians in particular to keep in shape and look as appealing as they can in order to sell their “product”. In his song “Speak for Me”, John Mayer laments the music which is currently circulating:
“Now the cover of a Rolling Stone,
Ain’t the cover of a Rolling Stone.
And the music on my radio,
Ain’t supposed to make me feel alone”

In my mind there is a confliction. We search Itunes and cd shops for something to listen to, but often factors other than the sound of the artist determine whether we buy it or not. It would be too easy just to say that music is dying, that modern musicians are in some way selling out. Frank Sinatra was an iconic celebrity, and not just because of his music, though few would doubt his talent. Similarly Elvis Presley became a cultural icon, so it seems that the idea of music and image being intertwined is not a particularly new one. And it isn’t just the musicians themselves who are obsessed with image: many fans of musical acts dress accordingly. How many people go to a Slipknot concert with a shirt and tie and their hair in a parting?

In 1979, The Buggles released the song “Video Killed the Radio Star”, but has it? Are music videos to blame for our obsession with image? On the one hand, musicians such as Rihanna must surely feel the pressure to keep in shape, and flaunt the body that she works hard to keep, but on the other hand the music video can be a great way of furthering a song’s meaning. Was music really more focused on the audible before the visual music video accompanied it?

Maybe it isn’t even image that is the problem, it could be argued that as soon as music started to be sold, then a problem would always arise and the music would become marginalised. Maybe Owen Campbell had the right idea when he was just travelling the world busking. Is the purest form of music we can find when people just play for the love of playing? The summer before last I went to see a group of 10 men called Fisherman’s Friends singing sea shanties on a beach in a cove called Port Isaac on the Cornish coast. The concert was one of the most memorable I have ever been to. The group had recently signed a record deal with Universal, and apart from one member, all of the men grew up within half a mile of Port Isaac. Local people flocked to the beach to see the free concert, which was in aid of local charities. The sun began to set and the tide began to eat up the Fisherman’s Friends’ sandy stage as the night went on. The men warmly and sarcastically joked that their lifestyle would be changing drastically now they had a record deal, and then sang songs right next to their local pub in which they would have sang to small audiences for years. Call me old-fashioned, but this is the kind of music that I would want to listen to, not the package deal that we are sold with modern day pop stars.

What do you think? Is music becoming too much of a greedy business, or has music always just been part of a bigger product? What do you think the root of the problem is?

Port Isaac’s Fisherman’s Friends