Mumford & Sons – I Will Wait
It’s time to bust your waistcoats out of storage and head for the nearest field: everyone’s favourite bucolic banjo-pluckers Mumford & Sons are back. After two years on the road touring their debut ‘Sigh No More’, the band are finally on the verge of releasing album number two, ‘Babel’.
At first glance, comeback single ‘I Will Wait’ sounds very much like something that could have been on the band’s debut LP. It takes the acoustic building blocks of traditional English folk music, smoothes them out and pumps them up to stadium size. Though it deals in the in familiar themes of loss and longing, you have to accept that the Mumfords have mastered a kind of triumphantly melancholic sound which is particularly suited to being bellowed by appreciative festival crowds.
In any case, the band promise that ‘Babel’ won’t just be ‘Sigh No More’ 2.0. ‘Touring so much and playing so many different kinds of places, especially big ones, affected how we hear ourselves as a band,” Ben Lovett told Spin “The dynamics of the new album are totally influenced by understanding what works live and what doesn’t. The trick is to make the intimate moments more intimate and the big moments bigger. That wasn’t something we understood when we made ‘Sigh No More’. Another big step up for us with this one is that it was much more collaborative. It wasn’t me or one of the other guys coming in with a whole song finished and saying ‘Here it is.’ It was more a case of someone coming in with an idea for a song and saying to the other guys, ‘Can you help me with it?’ That happened because we’ve gotten so comfortable playing together as a unit.”
This bodes well for the band. If it’s anything like its predecessor, ‘Babel’ is going to sell like the clappers and see Mumford & Sons back on the road for a further few years.
