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A very enjoyable album. Sometimes the banjo can interfere with the tone of a track but it's something you get used to with repeated listens; and you will definitely be listening to this album more than once! The main vocalist, Marcus Mumford, has a raspy but strong and listenable voice. The lyrics may be on the cheesy side at times but they work and fit the mood of each song. Marcus delivers them with emotion and character. I am certainly no expert in folk, not UK folk at least, so I cannot say if this is "good folk" or "bad folk". It matters not of course, unless you only want to listen to folk that you already listen to. In which case what are you doing here?
Overall a superb album with plenty of variation but enough recurrence to keep the whole thing consistent and feeling solid. It's an uplifting kind of album without being sickly.
To those who have been put off by the negative reviews, I have this to say before you decide to not even give this album a go:
Part 1
It's an annoying but very common problem with humans that they must always try to rationalise their beliefs instead of finding out why they have them in the first place. If you don't like this album for any of the following reasons;
- "it's not folk"
- "the lyrics aren't deep enough, or other lyrical-based pseudo complaint"
- "it's unoriginal"
- "there are better folk bands either now or in the past"
- "it sounds like band X with modifier Y"
- "it doesn't live up to the hype"
- "the hype annoys me"
- "the musicianship is simple/not as good as bands A, B and C"
then you are trying to rationalise, using fallacy, something that you cannot explain. Most of the negative reviews of this album follow the same fallacious patterns.
Part 2
There may be many reasons why you really don't like the album. They may include:
- you dislike the image associated with the band, by which I mean you think you would be seen as someone who likes Mumford and Sons therefore someone who doesn't really know what they're talking about when it comes to folk
- your animosity towards something is directly proportional to it's popularity at the time. The at the time part is important, especially when considering music that whilst not popular today may have been popular in the past and met with equal animosity (note that this may not apply to Mumford and Sons - this is just a general phenomena to be aware of)
- you get little or no enjoyment from listening to the music (you may like the odd track but over all the album does not entertain you, at least not in your usual music-listening environment - another important, but potentially unrelated-to-this-album, phenomena to be aware of; setting can change opinion. For example one may dislike dance music until one is required to dance to it)
There are others of course but this is an Amazon review, I'm off work today, I'm not getting paid to write this and I have a cold. So this is not going to be as in-depth as I would like!
Apart from offensive lyrics (subjective it may be but I'm sure we can all think of lyrics that we would not want to hear. For example I would not want to listen to an otherwise beautiful piece of music that had lyrics describing all my worst traits) only the third reason (no enjoyment) is actually valid as a reason for not liking music. If you get no enjoyment from this album then that is where I leave the conversation. We all know how it feels not to enjoy something. There is plenty of music I do not enjoy and would never purchase. It's enough for me to say I don't enjoy listening (or at least I have no use for the music; I may enjoy a bit of drum and base but if I'm not throwing drum and base parties I may not want to fork out for the CDs that will only get used at the parties themselves). We're all allowed to enjoy and dislike whatever we want and we don't have to go further than saying "listened to it, didn't like it". Of course you could go through each song on an album and point out each moment that turned you off. That's what reviews are for.
What you can't (well...shouldn't) do is claim not to like something and then offer a review's worth of fallacy in order to justify that claim. It's disingenuous and blatantly transparent. All those reasons I listed at the beginning of the review are reasons I have seen for people disliking this and other albums (replace the word folk with whatever supposed genre you're dealing with). They are all useless. I don't care if you think some other band is better. I don't care if you don't like the lyrics (unless you can specify instead of using vague and ambiguous terminology in a poor attempt to hide your ineptitude in articulation). So whilst the first two reasons in Part 2 are what I have called real reasons, they are still poor justifications for disliking a piece of music. For too many people (most?) the music they listen to directly reflects what sort of person they are (or would like to be). For me and a few others, the music I like says exactly nothing about who I am. I like what I like and I'm not afraid to say what those things are. For this reason I can listen to absolutely anything you wish me to with an open mind and will give a genuine and honest account of what I think of it. For example there are two albums by my favourite band (which shall remain nameless) that I simply cannot listen to. I don't own the albums but have borrowed them and tried many times to "get into" them. I can't. One song from each is all I like (two very good songs might I add). Amongst other fans of this band I would be ridiculed and not even considered a "real fan". Well that's because I'm not. Fan is short for fanatic, so yeah you can keep your fandom and I'll stick to liking what I like. My favourite solo artist has released more music than I'd know what to do with over the last 50 years and guess what? I'd say about 60 - 75% of it is awful. But they are still my favourite solo artist because the good stuff is good enough and there's enough of it.
What's the point of all this waffling on in a review of Mumford and Sons? Well the points are as follows:
1. Understand where your thoughts, prejudices and beliefs come from before you spout them and are left struggling to justify them. This is harder than you think by the way but worth the effort.
2. Keep an open mind when listening to music. Remember you are judging the music itself not the artist or that artist's fans (one reason why I can happily claim to like several Take That songs)
3. Don't judge anything based on your expectations.
4. If you don't like a certain piece of music, it's enough to just say so without invoking fallacy after fallacy.
5. Learn what subjectivity means
6. Musical genres do not exist and are an illusion. Once you realise this you will be able to open your eyes to a whole new world of music!
The End.
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Good album
It's a good album played this alot on streaming services so decided to buy it on cd back in 2020 yeah who buy cds anymore
Top reviews from United Kingdom
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- Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 9 December 2009
- Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 31 December 2009
Top reviews from other countries
- LuzmapssReviewed in Mexico on 20 May 2020
Looooove It! Best album, best edition
For me, the Best album of Mumford and Sons, each one of them have their style and music evolution, love them too, but Sigh no More is truly the very Best of M&S and truthful with their essence.LuzmapssLooooove It! Best album, best edition
Reviewed in Mexico on 20 May 2020
Love this special edition, it's awesome, worth having it physically.
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- CosmicCuriosityReviewed in the United States on 26 April 2011
Five stars for the music, One star for the packaging
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