Babel by Mumford & Sons

There isn’t much new here as far as the style and musical spectrum the band established on their debut is concerned, but the quartet is still doing what they do quite well.

What they’ve delivered in Babel is part two of Sigh, with more irresistible pop hooks, lofty lyrics, and the dynamic interplay between loud and soft that pushed the group into the international spotlight.

With Babel, Mumford & Sons has proven that it can do it again, replicating all that made Sigh No More so successful and well loved.

If you can get past the earnest nostalgia and tweedy affectations, this isn’t a bad album, just an average one. 

Babel, on the other hand, is more streamlined than their debut LP, and its shimmering production value sounds more like a stack of individually recorded tracks.

While there are some real gems here, occasionally the songs tend to fade into generic background folk music. 

On Babel, Mumford & Sons dismantle the pieces of Sigh No More, reassembling them into a bizarre, grating mishmash. All too frequently, Babel sounds like a warped mimicry of the band’s debut.

If there's only a finite number of albums that will ever be made in the history of the universe the fact that Mumford And Sons now account for two of them is tragic.

It’s truly perplexing how a band like Mumford & Sons is allowed all the creative freedom, production, and studio time the music industry can offer, and still come up with an album so sterile and devoid of any real emotion.

This attempt to sit atop the clouds of folk legends falls like a brick through the stratosphere. Anodyne, fake, faux-naïve, Marcus Mumford sounds like a man with an anger management issue, who flares up, screams for a few minutes, realises he's made a fool of himself and sits down embarrassedly. They over-emote and use expensive studio tricks trying to sound epic. Laura Marling takes an acoustic guitar and soars higher than they ever will - maybe it's because their banjos are weighing them down…

This is a good album. Don't know why it's got such a bad rating

banjo led folk indie, a fairly decent album but no surprises and nowhere near as good as Sigh No More

You got the genre wrong, it's Stadium Folk