Well, Iceland. Being such a weird country that most people know little about, it's probably easy to lump everything that comes from there in the same basket. Which is to be expected. The truth is, though lots of people tend to compare Múm with Sigur Rós and all that, they're really quite different. Whereas Sigur Rós tend to invite comparisons with Pink Floyd, Mike Oldfield, and grud knows why, Radiohead, you can't do that with Yesterday Was Dramatic, Today Is OK. There are some obvious touchstones of course, "Smell Memory" and "Random Summer" wouldn't sound out of place on Autechre's arctic meisterwerk Amber, and other bits recall Boards Of Canada or Luke Vibert without the hip-hop influence, and not being so bleeding obscure about their intentions as their countrymen. There's always a wierd kink waiting around the corner to bop you on the head, often courtesy of the neat mix of IDM-du-jour glitches, wrongheaded breakbeats and artificially sweetened melodies playing off the acoustic instrumentation of guitars, clarinets and trumpet. It's neither IDM or postrock, there's elements of both, but also good hints of folkloric and demoscene music elements as well.
The Boards of Canada reference isn't such a bad one, actually, they're similar in way their music somehow manages to recall childhood memories - the sort you try to forget and almost do until you happen across an old stomping ground, or see an old show on TV, and it comes right back to you - much like a memory of a smell, actually. But Múm are much more upfront about it, practically spelling it out in the liner notes, the cute melodies, and the occasional background vocal. "The Ballad of the Broken Birdie records" is absolutely twee, f'rinstance, and manages to get away with it, perhaps the siren is a fairy, not the sort that's nice and playful, but the sort that would kidnap your children and cook them over a spit at a barbeque for all the delightful woodland creatures.
In other places, it's not so childish: The two-track suite "Asleep on a Train/Awake on a Train" fits the titles perfectly, the scuttering lo-fi breakbeat with harmonium(?) putting you in that state of mind that one associates with train travel, when there's nothing to do but read the paper or a novel, listed to your walkman, ignore the other passengers, and watch the scenery go buy. You nod off for a second, then suddenly "Awake" starts, and another dinky melody with a locomotive accompaniment, gradually slowing down with the mood corresponding. It gets better, fading away into glitchdust, before the best bit of the whole album kicks in, a acoustic section rather reminiscent of Tortoise's less wanky moments, with guitar and clarinet, accompanied by glitches and clicks rather than a real guitar.
It's a little less exciting after then, but "Sunday Night Just Keeps On Rolling" starts off sounding as close to Sigur Rós as these chaps get, building up the texture before dropping in some frenetic beatwork, again waking everyone up, presumably so they can be shoved out the door so they can ride home on a "Slow Bicycle". In all, Yesterday Was Dramatic, Today Is OK seems a little patchy in parts of first, and other bits get straight to the point, but then again the range of moods works well for most of the album, and it's well worth getting in at your favourite retailer of semi-weird records.
