Mumford & Sons at The Olympia Theatre, Dublin on March 18th 2011
Review by James Hendicott
Photos by Kieran Frost
Announcing a late show the night after St Patrick’s Day only a few weeks before the date itself: Mumford & Sons are nothing if not confident of their appeal. Rightly, it turns out. The band might have slipped from ‘hot new thing’ to bordering on ‘critically panned’ status over the past 12 months or so (radio play does tend to irk critics – go figure), but tonight’s show is nothing if not a boisterous sell out.
This is probably the last tour before Mumford hit the studio to record the follow up to ‘Sigh No More’ and tonight’s set list is a hefty mix of tracks from the debut and an apologetically introduced handful from the to-be-recorded follow up. The highlights are predictably: ‘Little Lion Man’ and ‘The Cave’ go down an absolute storm, prompting huge sing-alongs. The album has captured the imagination beyond the big singles, though, and the assembled throng are almost as familiar with album tracks like ‘Roll Away Your Stone’ and ‘Awake My Soul’ as they are with the real image-makers. The new efforts – while predictably failing to garner quite the same response – are ‘being shaped live’, and are certainly far from out of place amongst the more established set.
Every track tonight is played with an enviable buzz. The entire band weave in and out of the front row, throwing their instruments around their stomping bodies during the quick numbers, and even thrashing the stand up bass up around their heads during ‘The Cave’. There’s roughly an equal mix of the leap-around lively and the mellow, borderline singer-songwriter moments that give us a different angle, a chilled out aside to the more lively trad-infused hits.
Mid way through the set, we’re treated to a real Olympia moment when the mellow ‘Timshel’ is performed entirely acoustically, an awkwardly quiet yet touching aside spoilt only slightly by parts of the audience struggling to settle down (most notably, those who insist on making prolonged ‘ssshhh’ noises far louder than the noises coming from anyone else). Stood microphone less at the front of the stage, the audience rise up to meet Mumford for the chorus, lifting the roof with each rendition of opening chorus line ‘You are not alone in this’; tender and tear jerking.
It’s not difficult to see why many argue that Mumford & Sons’ genre is one that’s a passing moment in time, just waiting to be outdone by something newer and more original. If there’s one band that’s likely to remain from ‘09/’10’s adventures in the touchingly twee, though, this band – alongside the inexplicably less critically acclaimed Stornaway – are probably them. They’re still the lively blend they’ve always been: twee folk meets seriously infectious, rampaging trad chords. They’re well suited to a Dublin crowd: they could scarcely be more Irish in style if they tried, and perform with an energy and affection that’s not toned down even a touch since the count down to studio time for a long awaited follow up album got underway. To expect the second album to surpass the first – which rode the crest of a twee wave to the chart heights – would probably be naive. Regardless, it’ll be full of touching tunes and, clearly, will garner plenty of passion.
