The temptation is to pin this on Mumford and Sons, but there are echoes of 10,000 Maniacs and Sinéad O'Connor in Of Monster and Men's decidedly flat take on quite pastoral music performed in IMAX.
At times like this, when the music does not interest me and dissecting it feels more like "being a prick" and less like "contributing to a conversation," I like to turn to immutable facts and wild speculation. For example: This band is from Iceland! Are they the most commercially successful musical product the landmass has created? Are these cats friends with Sigur Rós, you think? It isn't that big a country. Remember when Sigur Rós made an album of what was basically whale songs before the singer turned into an indie-disco sensation? What is it about fermented shark and cable sweaters that makes people want this kind of pathos? Maybe we'd all be swinging for the fences if we lived in the dark half of the year.
The Lumineers song "Ho Hey" was released about two months after this album came out. That song, at least in my mind, stands out as the biggest example, the meanest joke, and the final word on the notion of "stadium folk," a movement that was at least sparked by Coldplay and brought into the light by Mumford and Sons. Acoustic guitars, played over giant amps, for you to stamp and shout along to, for us all to sing at the same time. Anyway, the Lumineers hit the nail so firmly on the head and with so mighty a blow that the damn board split beneath it. If not them, it could have been us. If not that, it could have been "Little Talks." It's the kind of song so overpowering (and exhausting) as to render little joys like "Love Love Love" or "Sloom" mute and forgotten.
Did you know Grey's Anatomy has been on for 20 years? Someone has to make soundtrack music for that show, I guess. It'll do until Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros get here.
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