Ornelius Mugison has an S.J. Perelman name. Itd turn up halfway through a New Yorker articlea molasses-voiced carnie, or a decrepit, canebent magician with worrisome ties to some absurdly named criminal underworld. Or maybe Perelman would be even more clever, and invent Ornelius Mugison the Icelandic pop starramshackle genre-obliterator, composer of three albums, winner of two of the top honors at Icelands National Music Awards (Best Album and Best Song), an absolute nobody in every other country in the world, where people have apparently filled their one Icelandic-musician slot with everybodys favorite swan-dressed beatboxer.
Im exaggerating. 2003s Lonely Mountain achieved the kind of please-listen-to-this critical acclaim usually reserved for such relentlessly unpopular artists as Momus, and the two follow-ups have been received solidly in the land of burned CDs and black Sharpie, but the bottom line is your average best friend, whether the last album he got excited about was X&Y or Rehearsing My Choir, has not heard of Mugison. Which is a shame, because he is exactly what people should be hearing about, as often and as stridently as possible.
Take Sea Y, the leadoff track on Lonely Mountain. Ten seconds of amiable electronic Rice Krispies noises and singer-songwriter acoustic guitar give way to brief, tumbling calliope tones. Mugison rumbles Beck-like about that most effective of pop-song characters, the nonspecific she, who in the case of Sea Y cant understand it / But I dont blame her. After this intro, which is solid but nothing to warrant the first two paragraphs of this post, the bottom drops out of the song, and an unrecognizable Mugison starts falsettoing the title over spiralling yelps of guitar. At this point there are about two and a half minutes left, and Mugison still has ahead of him a sudden shudder of dirty guitar, a music-box verse with the frozen immediacy of ultra-slick Europop, and a ghostly acapella bit in which his multitracked wails converge on the titular Y like missiles through rain. The song shares a haphazard, giddily eclectic feel with the current wave of ADD-rock, but its disparate parts are bound tightly together by the mantra-like lyrical repetition and the constantly winding swamplight music; it has more in common with such sculpted masterpieces as Happiness is a Warm Gun than with Architecture in Helsinkis striated suites.
Murr Murr, the award-winning track from this years Mugimama, Is This Monkey Music?, is more of a straightforward pop song than Sea Y; it makes great use of a high-mixed acoustic-guitar riff, tripping and squiggling its way around Mugisons unearthly voice. It sounds like a Martian Jack Johnson, and then about halfway through the guitar stumbles into an electronic bear trap, which chews it up and spits it into the left channel, before vanishing again and leaving the riff to lope on, mangled and shaken. On the same album, the hushed Nick Drake-isms of Id Ask are slowly augmented by far-off fingersnaps, ghostly Parisian accordion, and Mugisons own vocal idiosyncracies, which include, at one point, purring. Quietly, though; he wouldnt want to be showy.
On his website, in slightly incorrect English, a disarmingly laid-back Mugison posts the lyrics and guitar tabs for Murr Murr: try to get the groove, and the feel to it, do your own version of it! This amiable modesty fits the music well; devoid both of the inflated meticulousness of Serious Rock Bands and the aggressive apathy of Irreverent Rock Bands, Mugisons songs are carefully and rewardingly constructed while seeming organic and spontaneous. And hes doing nothing if not evolving: Go Blind, from his next album, is a huge yet constrained affair that sounds like Led Zeppelin playing a gig in an isolation tank. And thats where he sheds his Perelman skin once and for allhowever evocative his name may be, Ornelius Mugison is nothing like a caricature, and works in nothing like a genre. It may not be clear exactly what hes doing, but whatever it is, he couldnt be better at it.
[buy stuff here or here]