Send "Mugison " Ringtones to your Cell 
| Prefixmag |
 Like fellow Icelander Bjork, the self-taught singer/songwriter Mugison is all over the musical map, channeling a childhood spent isolated from popular music into a musical vernacular that is solely his own. Mugison’s first two albums, 2003’s Lonely Mountain and 2005’s Mugimama: Is This Monkey Music? ran the gamut from screeching electronic noise to ballads syrupy enough to bring irony into the conversation. Whatever the intent, those two releases established him as a genuine star in his native Iceland, and something of a musical curiosity in the United States. Mugiboogie offers more of Mugison’s idiosyncratic take on pop music, this time filtered through the lens of a more traditional rock sensibility. Mugison’s trademark as an artist has been the continual development of his sound. On previous albums he was the entire band, but Mugison’s muse took him in an entirely different direction this time: the classic rock 'n' roll record. Retreating to a remote fishing village, he ditched electronics and the go-it-alone ethos in favor of flesh-and-blood bandmates. Some traits haven't changed: The result is undeniably original, sometimes hard to listen to, but always interesting. Mugison’s interpretation of rock 'n' roll lands somewhere between Ryan Adams and the Pixies, with extended instrumental interludes that highlight his singularity as an artist. There’s not really a definite answer for whether Mugison's experiments with rock are successful and whether the album works; he's working with a vocabulary that isn’t common in pop music. While there are familiar melodic phrases in the songs and Mugison for the most part utilizes classic rock instrumentation, parts of Mugiboogie are beamed in from a plain of weirdness reserved for Icelandic musicians. The music may not always be easily accessible, but it is almost always interesting....full text |
| Drownedinsound |
| Having previously followed the 21st Century troubadour approach of one man with a guitar and a laptop, Mugiboogie sees Mugison (or Örn Elías Guðmundsson, to those confident of their Icelandic pronunciation) working with anything up to ten other musicians at a time to communicate his diverse, or more accurately borderline schizophrenic, musical vision. There’s a definite link between Mugiboogie’s ADD cycling through disparate styles and Stereopathetic Soul Manure and Mellow Gold-era Beck. From the title-track’s glam stomp through to dusty country ballads, lilting ‘60s pop and the Slayer-style eruption of ‘Two Thumb Sucking Son of a Boyo’, Mugison could never be accused of getting stuck in a rut. On the contrary, there are times during Mugiboogie’s run-time where you might well find yourself longing for anything even vaguely resembling a rut, or at least a bit more continuity. In between all the noise and crossbred styles, however, Mugiboogie still finds room for the types of meditative acoustic ballads that first won Mugison attention back in 2003. Two standouts are ‘George Harrison’, a heartfelt tribute to the Krishna-crazy Beatle, and the almost unbearably haunting ‘Deep Breathing’, which sets lyrics about a mother’s illness to guitar, celesta and strings that swirl dizzyingly from minor to major and back again. Coming right after ‘Deep Breathing’, the death metal-deep vocals and portentous synths of ‘I’m Alright’ are about as welcome as a leper at an orgy, and not for the first time prompt the thought that programming the tracklisting was probably the last thing to get done at the end of a very busy day. Such suspicions are only compounded when ‘The Animal’ rolls around, sounding as it does like a forgotten yacht-rock nugget stuck in a tug-of-war between Buffalo Springfield and Cornelius. Some albums only really make sense when listened to in their totality. Many of the songs on Mugiboogie, by contrast, only reveal their true quality when given some distance from their overbearing, weirdo neighbours. It might not quite pay off as an album in the traditional sense, but in the era of iTunes playlists and vanishingly brief attention spans, Mugiboogie comes packed full of valuable ammunition....full text |
| Pastemagazine |
| If you dumped blues, power pop, psych rock and heavy metal into a transmogrifying machine, the machine would rumble mysteriously, then spit out a brightly colored block of a hitherto unimagined polymer known as Mugison. The one-man band’s guitar-and-computer pastiches have earned him the highest mainstream accolades in his native Iceland, which implies that the Icelandic mainstream is a bit more tolerant of unabashed weirdoes than its U.S. counterpart. At its best, Mugiboogie sounds a bit like Spoon, if they were kind of insane and way into Primus. Heavy-metal screams round off into blues sneers over crispy-fried guitars, with the kind of spazzy rabidity that’s synonymous with Ipecac label head Mike Patton. On this prismatically diverse album, there will come a moment—perhaps during the surprisingly self-descriptive psych-rock stomper “Jesus is a Good Name to Moan,” or perhaps during its prog-metal foil, “I’m Alright”—when you think, “Let’s all take a deep breath.” Personally, I prefer Mugison when he’s mellower and more centered (as on languid, synthetically symphonic folk tune “Deep Breathing”). But you gotta admire a guy with the sack to name his George Harrison rip-off/homage—wait for it—“George Harrison.”...full text |
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