Mm

Yeah, Mm is from Iceland, but let's forgo all the snow similes for a minute. As goosebump-raising as the group's music can be, it's anything but frigid; in fact, Mm's new album is called Summer Make Good, and it's infused more with warmth and friskiness than chill and desolation. Formed...

By Jason Heller

June 24, 2004

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Yeah, Mm is from Iceland, but let's forgo all the snow similes for a minute. As goosebump-raising as the group's music can be, it's anything but frigid; in fact, Mm's new album is called Summer Make Good, and it's infused more with warmth and friskiness than chill and desolation. Formed in 1997 by four Odin-spawned teens in Reykjavík, the ensemble released three full-lengths and a remix disc between 2000 and 2002 that solidified its position somewhere between Boards of Canada's paradoxically lush sparseness and the necromantic pop tinkering of fellow fjord-dweller Bjrk. Summer stretches even further into the realms of melody and experimentalism, collating everything from glitch-inspired spluttering to pizzicato chamber folk to washes of ambient drone. And although the individual bandmembers' names are irrelevant (read: a pain in the ass to type), one among them is a woman who lisps and whispers elfishly, while another apparently plays all of his instruments from the bottom of an overflowing bathtub. But regardless of Mm's cold curiosity and crystallized intellect, its songs are built around the rhythms of the steady drip of an Arctic summer thaw. A new ice age, it ain't.

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