Múm

Last year Múm had the opportunity to join Sigur Rós and the Notwist as figureheads in a genre that is still searching for an adequate title. Instead, they delivered Summer Make Good, an album so disappointing it had the band reaching for their back catalogue as expiation to their fans. Fortunately for them, they had a brilliant, obscure LP with a six-year accumulation of dust sitting idle in Iceland. Remastered and released through Morr Music, Yesterday Was Dramatic — Today Is OK seems like a prodigious lurch forward instead of a retrospective glance at their debut LP. Song structures and timings are blithely unorthodox while, perhaps most impressively, Mum steals a trick from Boards of Canada in which auxiliary noises form a subtle melody to compete for attention with the primary melody. The effect is layers of nuanced repetition that create an enduring sense of anticipation for the next noise or thematic shift — and when it comes (as it nearly always does) the results are consistently gorgeous.