Clash Album Reviews Mockingbird Wish Me Luck Days Come And Go
The latest gang of Swedes aiming to out-twee the Brits, Mockingbird, Wish Me Luck is the music of the Wennergren brothers writ large: folky strums transformed into the soundtrack to a lost ’60s movie of which Stuart Murdoch has the only surviving copy. It’s probably fitting that the debut album by a band named after a collection of short stories should consist of songs recorded periodically over the past four years. At times, it shows – a pedestrian opening gradually quickens with the Calexicoesque ‘The Way That You Paint It’, only overstretch themselves on the camp melodrama of the title track. They may wear their influences like badges on a parka – but they sport them better than most.
Lamacq BBC 6 Music Blog The Silvery Prize Nomination
“Take Silvery! Silvery sound like Sparks, the Kaiser Chiefs, The Cardiacs and XTC (or at least their alter ego The Dukes Of Stratosphear). The combination is awkwardly tuneful, upbeat, glam and weird. Add to this images of Victorian London, old steam ships and the industrial revolution -and they sound like nothing in the charts (which shouldn’t be a reason for them NOT to be in the charts, but who’s taking any risks these days?). The Silvery album due later this year, titled Thunderer & Excelsior, is a quirky record without being a novelty record. It is, for want of a better word, a little eccentric, but only comparatively so (because everyone else has become so straight this year). Randomly dipping into it, Foreign Exchange & The Drilling Machine sounds like a distorted fairground ride; Revolving Sleepy Signs is where art-rock meets music hall; and Action Force is my favourite rapid-fire, jerky pop song of the year.”
NME Album Reviews Mockingbird Wish Me Luck Days Come And Go
In the land of orchestral indie pop, the bloodline is always pure, meaning that the genre often wears the glazed expression of theterminally inbred. Step forward, please,the cherub-cheeked, flaxen-haired facesof MWML: eight young Swedes whoDIYed their debut in their parents’ flats.This was a years-long labour of love andit shows: the arrangements are knittedlike lace doilies, all apologeticallyparping brass overlain on tremblingflutes, topped by wry but sincerehometown poetry. That’s not to say itlacks triumphs: ‘New Beginnings’ especially bops along like a marzipan EStreet Band, but sat so firmly in the valeof their Belle & Sebastian forebears, it’s difficult to see what they’re adding to the gene pool.
