It effectively weaves in a lot of elements the band struggled with on their first album. In a bit of perfect sequencing, this song is followed by “Lover of the Light”, a big, inspiring widescreen track. Not only is the refrain the quietest part of the song, but the band also has the good sense to let the track gradually fade out. As the song goes, it gradually adds in acoustic guitar and nice, subtle electric slide guitar, but resists the urge to go big.

“Ghosts That We Knew” is a bonafide ballad, complete with gorgeous piano chords and beautiful, close harmonies that add to the warmth. It isn’t until around the middle of the album that the band really starts to stretch out. But he backs off on the usually-overpowering guitar strumming here and lets Marshall’s banjo picking dominate the music. Second song “Whispers in the Dark” is another uptempo stomper with Mumford obsessively thumping his kick drum on every beat. It’s not a big departure, but for Mumford & Sons, this counts as progress. It’s exactly what you’d expect, but instead of starting quiet and going loud, the band stops dead a couple times mid-song and lets Mumford get quiet. So the album opens with the title track, which features Mumford singing as loud as possible while the band chugs away in a minor key. What Babel does well is tone down the band’s tendency to shove every element they like into every single song. It’s a good single because it’s instantly recognizable as Mumford & Sons without specifically repeating their earlier tracks. It gives the band’s excellent harmonies additional warmth, and the horn section is used in small doses but to good effect. But this time around, the band opts to use a major key for its sentimental message of love. It’s a song largely driven by the nonstop kick drum of lead singer Marcus Mumford, Mumford’s guitar strumming, and Winston Marshall’s active banjo line. At times, they’re still annoyingly bombastic for an ostensible folk band, but Babel shows a lot of development stylistically.įirst single “I Will Wait” is a small illustration of that development. Fortunately for their fans and for fans of the folk and Americana genres everywhere, Mumford & Sons have taken the latter path. But one would hope the young band would take their success and use it as a chance to improve and grow as a band. It’s easy to take selling two million albums in the United States and another million in the UK as a mandate to keep doing exactly the same thing. Clearly, resting on their laurels was an option. So the challenge for Mumford & Sons with their all-important follow-up album, Babel, was to replicate their previous success while expanding their sound and improving their songwriting. You got to hear them do that again and again as well! Sure, the band was doing something very different from its brethren in the Top 40 pop universe, but it was doing it differently in the exact same way on nearly every song. Did you like the chugging minor key acoustic guitar of “Little Lion Man”? Good, because you heard it a bunch more times if you bought the album! Did you like how the band added horns to bolster its sound on “The Cave”? Excellent. And most of the time, the songs started quiet and still and then quickly burst into loud and bombastic. Mumford & Sons seemed to have two settings - quiet and still or loud and bombastic. It was fortunate that the band had such a strong pair of singles, because the rest of Sigh No More was disappointingly monochromatic. Despite also being in a minor key, the song was bright-sounding and built to a huge horn-infused climax while never losing its forward momentum. “Little Lion Man”, with its urgent, minor key guitar and banjo interplay and its bracing chorus (“I really fucked it up this time”), managed to sound organic and folky while still rocking surprisingly hard for an acoustic group. All credit to the band and Glassnote Records, because it would have been difficult to find two better songs from Sigh No More to spring on an unsuspecting public. Mumford & Sons’ debut album, Sigh No More, sold millions of copies based on the strength of its two singles, “Little Lion Man” and “The Cave”.

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