Talk about a lot to get your head around. For their second release, Melbourne band Mum
Smokes have decided to go with a double album: two separate discs recorded at entirely
different times, comprised of 31 tracks in total, all written by the four different songwriters
who make up the band. There’s ambient drone jams, there’s ragged indie rock, there’s
fragile pop, and that’s just one of the discs. It should, by rights, be a complete and utter
mess – it should be an overindulgent dog’s breakfast. It definitely takes more than a couple of listens for it to even start to make sense. But when it clicks and when it becomes just a little bit familiar, for some reason, it all works. Rather beautifully, too.

As could be expected, it’s the poppier material that tends to make an impression first.
Lead single Left For Dead from ‘House Music’ is all jagged rhythms, manic backing vocals
and pop nostalgia – an immediate standout, as is the softly sung pop gem that precedes
it, Jazz Tiger. But there’s the other side of the two albums as well – ‘House Music’ opens with the busted up noise and feedback of Catherine, and later revisits the soundscapes in a
more ambient format in the guise of Meltdown Creation, two minutes of atmospheric ebb
and fl ow that wouldn’t sound out of place on one of Brian Eno’s late Seventies albums.
‘Easy’, on the other hand, begins with the dreamy Wrap Up before drifting into the
more driven Non Commercial Lifestyle Activities. Later in the disc, 1949 starts with the kind of ragged guitar that could fit within Eno’s earlier Seventies output. It’s intentionally not as virtuosic as Robert Fripp’s skewed take on pop, but it shows a lot of the same kinds of sensibilities – turning the genre upside down and injecting it with noise.

On the whole, ‘Easy’ stands as a more linear work than ‘House Music’. There’s less in
the way of soundscapes and sonic deviations, though it’s no less interesting in terms of
its writing. You could argue that the collection should have been released as separate
albums, but the sheer volume and variety spread across the two discs really is a huge part
of its draw, and the sequencing moves from track to track with enough delicacy that the
variety is rarely jarring. It’s a unique, often obtuse but ultimately brilliant collection of music
that shouldn’t be missed.

Alistair Wallis