ARTiST: Mumm-Ra
TiTLE: These Things Move In Threes
LABEL: Columbia
GENRE: Indie
TiME: 44:19 min
SiZE: 66,0 MB
BiTRATE: VBRkbps
RiP DATE: May-22-2007
RELEASE DATE: May-28-2007
WEBSiTE: http://www.mumm-ra.com/
Track List:
01. Now Or Never 03:53
02. Out Of The Question 04:33
03. These Things Move In Threes 03:31
04. She's Got You High 03:25
05. Song B 04:09
06. The Sick Deal 03:36
07. Light Up This Room 03:54
08. Starlight 03:29
09. This Is Easy 03:33
10. What Would Steve Do? 02:55
11. Down Down Down 07:21
Release Notes:
Mumm-Ra are a band of modest ambitions. All they
want out of life is to be like no other band on the
face of the planet, to stretch and contort the very
fabric of what we mere humans know as 'music' and to
write tunes that make the supernatural wonders of
the damsel with a dulcimer in Coleridge's Kubla Khan
sound like The Horrors with cholera. Oh, and rock
like bastards.
"We wanted to make something quite diverse," says
singer James 'Noo' New. "All through the
manifestations of Mumm-Ra we've always had a pride
in trying to do things that sound different, have
different ideas. It's quite hard to balance all the
sides and obviously at the same time write brilliant
songs."
And yet they've made it look effortless. Like no
other band on the planet? How many other bands about
to release their debut album can recount a
seven-year history including attempted suicide at
gigs, electrocution, armed robbery, getting pelted
with teabags and twenty-minute sitar solos? Let's
consider the facts...
Mumm-Ra were formed ('they' being Noo, bassist
Niall, drummer Gareth and guitarists Oli and Tate)
at the age of fifteen as schoolmates in
Bexhill-On-Sea, a town which had only previously had
brushes with 'rock'n'roll' during its more
incontinent tea dances. To their school-mates they
were The Spods Least Likely To Ever Be Cool, Let
Alone Form A Kick-Ass Rock Band, and as the put upon
local outcasts they'd have wholeheartedly agreed:
delving into the seedy underbelly of rock was far
from their hairy noggins as they spent their lazy
teenage days hiking, drinking tea with the Major,
playing Monopoly, Scrabble, crazy golf and Manhunt
and dodging insults from the hoodies around town
(their contemporaries called them The Hair Bear
Bunch or simply "gay").
The band, they insist, "just happened" because they
got bored and picked up guitars - more of a 'club'
than a band the formed before any of them could
actually play their instruments; at first they
didn't have a drumkit so Gareth played tambourine.
They even spent six months coming up with a name
before plumping for that of the baddie from
Thundercats: not only the least cool moniker since
Carter The Unstoppable Sex Machine but one which no
venue in the land could actually spell properly.
"We go to different venues and no-one can spell it
right," says Oli. "At the Barfly last time it was
Mumrr-a."
It only got stranger. Short of major international
gig venues in Bexhill, Mumm-Ra were forced to play
their shambolic early shows in town halls, mates'
barns and rowing clubs. The gigs were beyond
bizarre: at one 'mini-festival' the band took to
boiling a kettle onstage, causing one particularly
off-kilter girl in the crowd to believe they were
brewing up some kind of hallucinogenic and call the
police before proceeding to smash her head against
the wall and slit her wrists in front of the band.
At another, due to faulty wiring in a venue known
only as 'Rory's Barn', the band were repeatedly
electrocuted onstage to the delight of an audience
consisting only, in faithful Shining style, of two
identical twins. And every gig would end with a
lengthy experimental jam entitled 'Cobbler Cobbler',
which generally saw members of the crowd clambering
onstage to join in to the point where the gig would
sometimes be finished by a band consisting entirely
of audience. And woe betide anybody that dared leave
the band the sitarist who fell by the wayside some
years ago hasn't been heard of since, and their
ex-keyboard player is currently residing at Her
Majesty's pleasure after a foiled attempt to hold up
a petrol station with a fake gun.
"The guy went 'this is bullet-proof glass'," says
Niall, soberly. "He would've got away but he crashed
on the way home."
Then, after four years of such mayhem, in 2005
Mumm-Ra noticed a thick fug of competence creeping
over them. The songs they were writing were no
longer aimless prog wibblings but hardy, nay
thrilling pop concoctions with Flaming Lips-ian
wafts of psychedelic majesty about them - songs like
Song B, Out Of The Question and What Would Steve Do?
(although, as we'll see, it wasn't called that yet)
fused forceful alt-rock with glacial space
atmospherics. Not only had Mumm-Ra accidentally and
against all laws of rock nature Gotten Good but
their years of psych-pop fumblings had made them an
extremely special band.
College was winding to a close, there was only one
thing for it: get a manager (the aforementioned
Steve), bash out some demos to some record labels,
hole up in a rehearsal space in a barn used to house
real-life working tanks and "give it a year". It
took a few weeks: the response was so overwhelming
that two showcase gigs were hastily arranged at the
Tunbridge Wells Forum and Crowhurst village hall and
the A&R contingent descended on rural East Sussex
pubs waving chequebooks in one hand and orienteering
maps in the other begging for directions ('left at
the sheep, right at the blind man', etc).
Snapped up by Columbia, Mumm-Ra decamped to Grenada
in Spain last year to record their debut album with
legendary producer Youth, complete with his rather
sinister methods of teasing out Mumm-Ra's darker
side.
"When we were recording he set up a giant projector
in the studio and it was night time and he played
The Wicker Man," says Noo. "So as we were playing it
someone was getting burnt."
Not that Mumm-Ra's inner darkness needed much
coaxing. During recording the band were repeatedly
hit with tragedy. Their manager sadly passed away
(hence the band naming their debut single What Would
Steve Do? "although the song's not about him at all.
We just called it that because we thought he'd love
it"), as did Noo's father, imbuing the record with
an underlying sombre Arcade Fire elegance (check out
Light Up This Room, These Things Move In Threes and
Down, Down, Down). An elegance which, paradoxically,
lifts an otherwise great pop album into the realms
of the sublime.
A record that stretches and contorts the very fabric
of what we mere humans know as 'music'? They're
getting there: there's certainly a lot of
preliminary prodding and tugging on These Things
Move In Threes. Alongside rampant pop ricochets like
She's Got You High, Out Of The Question and
Starlight you'll find quirky, quaint rural rock like
Song B, epic post-rock tear-jerkers such as Now Or
Never and all-out Sigur Ros orchestral grandiosity
on Down, Down, Down and The Sick Deal. It's a pop
record with a Hulk at its heart, a veritable
Thundercat of tuneage. Whatever its impact, These
Things Move In Threes is definitely among the most
unique, accomplished and stunning debut albums
you'll hear in 2007.
"I'm worried it might be too big," says Noo. "It's
slightly bombastic but I don't think it's way out
there. You could see it as a big record by a big
band or you could see it as pretentious little
21-year-olds thinking they're the Floyd or
something."
Back from Granada, Mumm-Ra honed their stagecraft on
tours with the likes of The Kooks and The Kaiser
Chiefs between stints polishing their album in Abbey
Road studios, finding their single releases - What
Would Steve Do?, The Black Hurts Day And The Night
Rolls On EP and Out Of The Question - creeping
steadily towards the coat tails of the charts. All
preparation for These Things Move In Threes to
launch them into the rock stratosphere.
"I'm ready for the big push now," says Noo
trepidously. "It's all ready, the album itself we're
all happy with that, it's exactly how we hoped it
would sound and we're ready for the roller coaster
ride."
Modest ambitions, monumental potential. Let's keep
2007 Mumm.