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  Mum - Go Go Smear The Poison IvyBy Daniel JohnsonNovember 5, 2007 Iceland's Mum were right there in the thick of glitch pop's prickly, pinging birth, cutting and pasting with the best of them. And what a birth it was. A new millennium was dawning and suddenly affordable, high-powered home recording software flowed like milk and honey through the land. It was like the sexual revolution - open to anyone and happening in bedrooms everywhere - and, like that movement, with all the freedom came a little VD. In this case in the form of sonic warts, or "glitches," resulting from editing mistakes. When a few cutting-edge producers had the bright idea to turn those errors into a new beat vocabulary, the rest was XLR8R history. Quiet became the new loud and micro, as a quaint shelter for all manner of ambition-less songwriting, the new twee. But maybe it's time somebody ratted out glitch pop to the FDA for being sold past its expiration date. Trends can rot too and, nearly eight years on, shit is getting a little stale. That's not a slight on founding Mum member Gunnar Orn Tynes, who records and produces his band's music. A minor celebrity in Icelandic music, and one of the finest producer/recordists anywhere, Tynes uses his digital scissors and glue to build fantastic-sounding dioramas of slurp and crunch around Mum's innocuous lullabies. And on Go Go Smear The Poison Ivy, you can hear him trying with all his might to wring any remaining vitality out of that most intimate of sub-sub genres. But as the novelty of micro-collage programmed to within an inch of its life wears away, too often what's left are pedestrian melodies, throw-away chord progressions and the forced breezy optimism of an Ambien commercial. When glitch pop is eventually put to pasture and ranked with cargo pants and one-inch indie buttons as a trend that overstayed its welcome by about three too many years, it may be a record as beautiful but flat as Go Go Smear that finally does it.
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