The three years that Mugison spent howling away in his garage were well spent. The former electronica artist from Iceland has gone rock and, with Mugiboogie, is delivering the sound of a man running amuck in the rock / blues / metal cupboard.
This, his third album, is steeped in a rich brew of drink, love, women and religion. Opener ‘Mugiboogie’ sounds like a statement of intent, slinging together beefy Hammond organ chords with stomping beats that are part glam rock and part Battles.
His swagger is laced with a neat sense of humour; one lyric explains how “I love the way she's looking at me, like fruit hanging low from a tree.” Elsewhere, ‘Jesus Is A Good Name To Moan’ memorably mixes the sexual with the spiritual, following its title with: “You were in my private parts but nowhere near / My love”.
The fear of losing someone close, or alternately the fear of not satisfying a lover, is never far away. The stabbing organ chords of ‘To The Bone’ are caught somewhere between the fact that “your loving pulls me through” and that the singer is “worried to the bone / that my lover... is not my own”.
He isn’t afraid to turn the volume down either, as on ‘The Pathetic Anthem’ and the sitar-backed, countryish ‘George Harrison’, which suggests, as the late Beatle sang, that all you need is love.
The inlay contains an illustration for each song, and the LP is artfully packaged in a leather sleeve which - according to one interview - is made out of recycled Bibles. It’s a clever touch that lifts Mugison out of the run of the mill.
Best new band in Glasgow, by a mile!
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