Ian Benson
Viewpoints Editor
Remember back in early 2010 when we were all younger and filled with a carefree innocence that we now recall with wistful nostalgia? Remember when you heard “Little Lion Man” or “The Cave” for the first of what is an estimated 13,134 times? Mumford & Sons released their new album “Babel” this last week, and it is pretty much a copy of their first one, “Sigh No More.”
The albums name references the biblical Tower of Babel. For those who didn’t just wiki it, the story goes to the tune of a unified humanity building a great tower whose top was in the heavens in the plain of Shinar. God saw this and didn’t like it because that’s what happens in the Old Testament, so he scattered the unified humanity and confounded their speech so they no longer understood each other. Applying this metaphor to the album, I think the band is the tower. Speaking of banjos, there are lots of them. Stretched over an hour. With a lot of foot stomping and those lyrics that lend themselves to people making tumblr gif sets of them, even though they do not actually mean anything. I listened through the album, though somewhere around track three I must have zoned out because next thing I knew it was track 11 and I didn’t realize the songs had changed.
The biggest flaw throughout the album is front man Marcus Mumford’s lyrics, which try to achieve some manner of poetry, but most of the time fail. Combined with his vocal delivery, the lyrics become overwrought and what should be brimming with emotion sounds surprisingly hollow.
Another flaw that holds “Babel” back is that there are really only three types of tracks on the 12 song album. There are your straightforward, foot-stomping and banjo roaring affairs, where Mumford shouts about being a jilted lover; your quiet acoustic guitar and Mumford’s hushed vocals about being a jilted lover; and your songs that start as the latter before transitioning into the former, usually about being a jilted lover. And most of these tracks seem like attempts to write the album climax, before Mumford & Sons decided that having 10 of those would be a great idea, leaving the listener with a record that continually tries to peak with zero build up.
To be honest, the album proved not to be for me. But if you liked the first one a lot, and if you like pop hooks and ambitious lyrics and that whole soft-into-loud, foot-stomping, banjoing thing they do, you’ll probably like this album. But if you’re going to take the time to criticize how a pair of lyrics in the song “Lover of the Light” make zero grammatical sense and how there is only one guitar rhythm, I suggest you look elsewhere.
Of course, in the USA alone, “Sigh No More” sold 2.4 million copies, and so far, “Babel” has sold over 600,000 copies, so clearly, they know some secret that I don’t.