At times it feels like you need a new language to help you make sense of it all. A looser, far more fluid tongue that runs emotions and places into each other and replaces sentences with a constantly shifting jumble of sounds that flow around what you want to say rather than running straight through it. A language that works only in the present tense but a present tense that encompasses several thousand years.
Sometimes you wonder if this is what it's like to be autistic. Set this album spinning and you become lost, engulfed, surrounded, mesmerised, consumed. There's no need to wonder what's going on in the real world because there's too much to occupy you in here echoes from deep underwater, a broom scraping metal, aeons old radio signals picked up by an abandoned NATO base on the roof of the world, a clatter of beats and rhythms, dead children singing.
You may know Mum for their beatific debut album that breathed sunlight into electronica or their darker second album featuring the otherworldly liltings of twin singers Kristin Anna and Gyda Valtysdottir. Album three finds Mum one twin down. Gyda, always the emotionally darker seeming of the sisters, has decamped to resume her classical cello studies. You'd expect, therefore, a return to the warm innocence of their debut. You'd be very very wrong.
Some context for latecomers. If Sigur Ros reflect the expanses of Iceland the breadth of the sky, the depths of the landscape, the eternity of emotions that have forged life on a tiny rock in the middle of nowhere then Mum are the tiny details. The superstitions in the hedgerows. The whispering voices that disappear when you turn around to confront them. The unspoken truths that lurk in the darkness of the countryside.
Musically, they're almost medieval, if accordions and baleful trumpets and the slightest brushes of guitar and drums fed through a steady current of electronics can be medieval. It's not uncommon for songs to drop away to the sound of wind whistling over presumably lonely moors and a door creaking somewhere, only for kindergarten chimes and flickering reverberations to flood in. It's all quietly spooky, lullabies for the lost and snapshots of moments the subconscious always tries to brush away. And then Kristin Anna starts singing.
She has the strangest voice, part Midwitch Cuckoos, part Ophelia, part little girl who's seen much too much. She could be singing the sweetest love song and sometimes she might be, if lyrics like "I hope tonight you will touch my hair and draw ghosts on my back" are anything to go by and you'd still see empty eye sockets and deserted living rooms. She wanders through the songs like an Amelie Of Death, drifting benignly onwards leaving a trail of dust and decay in her wake.
In the end, the language you need is a secret one. There are things in this record that shouldn't be uttered aloud, ghosts crying out to be laid to rest. This is a strange, disturbing, unsettling, compelling album. Just don't listen to it in the dark.
