The rhapsodic raptures juxtaposed with distortion-fueled vexations that encompass Mugiboogie in one way outline the singer/songwriter Örn Elías Guðmundsson’s own spectrum of conscience: equal parts attrition and audacity.  But this emotional and musical mélange seems to be as immanently Mugison (Guðmundsson’s guise) as it is Icelandic.

Under his musical moniker—named by drunken Malaysians one night in 2001 (his father’s nickname is Mugi)—Guðmundsson blithely personifies much of the contrast between his island nation’s bright exterior and murky undercurrent. As he described in a 2005 Paste interview, using polished American superheroes to contrast, in Iceland, “It’s nearly like a fascination with murderers, misfits, the lowlifes—they always win ...

Mugison is Icelandic born singer songwriter and all round blues powerhouse Örn Elías Guðmundsson. Yes, not exactly a blues name is it. But trust me this man has blues running through his veins. The name Mugison was a childhood nickname and literally means son of Mugi, who is his father. There’s something about Malaysians who couldn’t pronounce his fathers name properly, or something. Sounds more Japanese though doesn’t it, like the second prodigy of Mr Miyagi. Anyways, Mugison was born, literally.

Icelandic Örn Elías Guðmundsson creates music — although what genre it falls under is harder to put a finger on. With a guitar, a computer, and a variety of yelps, screams, and other throat tricks in his arsenal, Mugison mixes blues, rock, and folk on his third full-length. He’s added a drummer and bassist to his one-man band formula, and the result is more accessible than his previous efforts, but with enough quirk to satisfy.
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The DIY, one-man-band approach of earlier albums by this Icelandic artist is here replaced by a proper group, which distances his nose a fraction from his navel without sacrificing the self-absorption and idiosyncrasies that made previous releases so bracing. Yes, it’s bonkers, but Mugiboogie is also impassioned and fierce: tracks such as the ripped-from-the-chest Jesus Is a Good Name to Moan, which recalls I Want You (She’s So Heavy), the equally (and appropriately) Beatlesy George Harrison and the falsetto-voiced anti-chauvinist diatribe The Animal may contain elements of playfulness, but they are also entirely convincing as heartfelt expressions of the state of things in the Mugi mind. Like Beck, Mugison can’t resist a musical tangent. Consequently, the album veers all over the place. Yet, as Deep Breathing’s lulling folk melody and alternately glacial and warming strings so amply demonstrate, Mugison’s juxtapositions are never less than deadly.

Having previously followed the 21st Century troubadour approach of one man with a guitar and a laptop, Mugiboogie sees Mugison (or Örn Elías Guðmundsson, to those confident of their Icelandic pronunciation) working with anything up to ten other musicians at a time to communicate his diverse, or more accurately borderline schizophrenic, musical vision.

........ is undeniably original, sometimes hard to listen to, but always interesting. Mugison’s interpretation of rock 'n' roll lands somewhere between Ryan Adams and the Pixies, with extended instrumental interludes that highlight his singularity as an artist.

Icelandic musician cooks up rock pastiche for the padded-cell set

If you dumped blues, power pop, psych rock and heavy metal into a transmogrifying machine, the machine would rumble mysteriously, then spit out a brightly colored block of a hitherto unimagined polymer known as Mugison.