BAND CRUSH: MUMFORD & SONS

A strum-by-strum report from their last acoustic concert.

The phrase “stadium-sized bluegrass” sounds just as odd as “London-born bluegrass,” but the superlative band Mumford and Sons manages to produce both. The quartet of English lads, floppy-haired, and some sporting vests that would be at home on the proprietor of some Spaghetti Western’s saloon, managed to rouse the normally impervious CMJ crowd of music industry professionals to a whooping cheer.

Ted Dwane, drummer and double bassist, Ben Lovett on keyboards, “Country” Winston Marshall, a banjo player and Marcus Mumford, the front man who writes their songs, cut to the chase: They played their spine-tingling single “Little Lion Man” (one of the few songs that drops the F-bomb and still manages to be sigh-inducingly lovely) early on in the gig.  Heavy on the harmony, it’s songs like this that earn them their most ardent fans – and their biggest detractors. Marcus’s craggy voice gets catapulted by his band mates into something far greater – the refreshing shock of a icy shower on a hot day – when they join him in an crescendo-ing fortississimo chorus. 

But, critics point out, it’s nothing that hasn’t been done before, say, erm, in the 1940s when bluegrass was cool and people played banjoes instead of ipods. Indeed there’s a touch of “Oh Brother Where Art Thou” to the Mumford boys, mitigated and modernized by some supremely well placed, heart-thumping hits of the kick-drum operated by Marcus’s foot while he plays guitar and sings center-stage. There are also the inevitable comparisons to the Fleet Foxes who brought the whole a cappella folksy-barbershop jag to the forefront of the Indie scene last year.

And while some criticize Mumford and Sons for having an inauthentic attachment to the Americana they strum and sing, they’re missing the point. Who cares if they grew up 3,000 miles across the Atlantic, far from any grass that could ever be called remotely blue? It’s not their local musical language, but the vibrating crowd at CMJ, and the sell-out tour they’re currently on, shows they speak it exceedingly well. 
--SARAH MASLIN NIR

myspace.com/mumfordandsons



This story was published on November 16, 2009.