Album of the Week: Mimas – Lifejackets
Right then, think of something that Denmark’s famous for.
Did you say bacon? Well done on your faintly xenophobic generalisation. But let’s be honest, it’s not a country that’s exactly set the world on fire with its politics, sport or music. Hopefully that will soon change, at least in the latter respect.
Epic popsters Mew have been largely critic-proof since 2003, but the last few years have seen Efterklang and the Kissaway Trail emerge to the wider world after plugging away in their home country for years. Spectral folksters Our Broken Garden have been getting positive notices and now here’s Mimas with their second effort.
You could be forgiven for their first album (2008′s The Worries) slipping under your radar – it certainly did with mine, but in hindsight it was a listenable effort, leaning heavily on post-rock influences, but with a rather cheerier feel than most of their genre contemporaries.
Lifejackets is a different beast. It doesn’t completely leave behind post rock – if you strip away Snævar Njáll Albertsson’s vocals there’s plenty of chiming guitars in the mix and the intro to Rotting Rodents will see many a chin stroked - but what the band have become is more akin to a Death Cab for Cutie that doesn’t take itself too seriously.
The below photo should be a giveaway anyway, but calling a song ‘La Moustache Formidable’ and then singing ‘facial hair gives me more confidence‘ ahead of a pleasing blast of trumpet sounds is a clear marker that we’re not dealing with po-faced dullards here.
They’ve been described as ‘quirky’, a word that normally has me reaching for the family baseball bat, but it fits. There are some top tunes here too – Vader kicks off with some hypnotic sounding double bass before melding into uplifting piano and yelped vocals; musically Sodapop may be the best thing here with some subtle African rhythms although it’s undermined by some needless swearing that’s probably meant for effect but just feels out of place.
The closing couplet will have your ears first burning (Touring) and then sighing (Relationship) as scything guitar collides with a piano lament. It sums up the album nicely. Right, I’m off to make a bacon sandwich.
Before I risked offence with a faintly xenophobic generalisation of my own, here’s what singing guitarist Snævar Njáll Albertsson had to say about the band and their new album, in what can only be called a lengthy Forrest Gump impression:
We’re four dudes that all share a big love for bacon and Deftones and Fang Island. We live in Denmark and are fighting the good fight here. That is: we’re trying to become really rich by writing songs no-one wants to play on the radio, so we’re kinda poor at the moment. We often sing ‘The Gambler’ by Kenny Rogers in the tour-van and it makes everyone smile. He’s a lifesaver. Writing the songs for the second album ‘Lifejackets’ was a lot of fun, but the recording process took forever. There was simply too much freedom to record whenever we’d like, as we didn’t go into a traditional studio to record and mix the album in three or four weeks. So we spent just about a year recording the whole thing and also wrote two songs in the process.
How do you feel your sound has progressed since The Worries?
On The Worries we were a lot more patient when it came to building up a song. We can only imagine two songs from The Worries fitting into the sound of the new record. On Lifejackets it’s all about not being afraid of doing something stupid where The Worries was all about not doing anything stupid at all. Stupid is what stupid does.
"Lifejackets, who needs lifej... oh."
Danish music seems in particularly rude health at the minute with the likes of Mew, the Kissaway Trail and Efterklang all getting international attention. Do you feel part of something?
There are a lot of good bands here in Denmark, but we’re not really about being a part of any music scene of just one nation-state. Since we’ve toured the UK quite a lot we’ve been inspired a lot by bands we’ve played with there. We did a tour with Shapes and they inspired us a lot. Then I started playing PING pong again…
Are you named after the Greek giant, Saturn’s moon or both. Or indeed neither?
My momma always said the Mimas moon looks exactly like the Death Star from Star Wars. Episode 4,5, 4 and six. Mainly… Gotta go. Lieutenant Dan fell of his chair again…
Hmmmm. Anyways, Mimas are on the A Badge of Friendship roster and they’re doing some rather nifty things with video. Have a look at ABOF TV for more info.
They’re also on tour this month, with a handful of UK dates including Glasgow, Leeds and London. Full details are on their website and you can listen to album track Application below. Phew!
