(I know I’m jumping incredibly late on the Mumford-Train, but there are still people out there who don’t know about them! And that needs to be changed, pronto!)

When Bloc Party put out their 2007 release A Weekend in the City, I sat and listened to it three times that very night and cried harder with each new song.

The lyrical work stunned me to no end and the instrumental arrangement just hit the right spot inside of me. People though the songs didn‘t fit the band; I found it sounded like a natural progression from their first record Silent Alarm.

If I told you now that it took another three years for a band to knock me off my feet and that they come from a pretty different field of rock, would you believe it?

These days, I find it tricky to buy full albums when you‘ve only heard one of two songs which are not single material. With Mumford & Sons‘ Sigh No More, I did no wrong though.

Reading about them on Twitter and listening to one or two live recordings of Winter Winds and Awake My Soul, I found myself intrigued enough to go as far as buying their CD on my recent trip to London. The city and tube stations being plastered with posters of their album cover did probably help in that decision too!

Sigh No More is plain and simple the perfect combination of a CD filled with slow, thoughtful songs, like White Blank Page and After the Storm, and sing-a-long numbers that command your feet to dance, especially singles Little Lion Man and The Cave.

The subject of the songs are of a great range: Some treat the infamous subject of love, break-ups and making mistakes and other goes as far as approaching the topics of death and our connection to God. The lyrics are never flat but well thought-out, encouraging the listener to go on an internal journey led by Marcus Mumford‘s voice.

And it‘s exactly that voice which should draw you into the spell of this fine band, if the lyrics don‘t do the trick for you. The singer manages to incorporate any kind of emotion into his voice: Sounding encouraging on Sigh No More when he‘s repeating Love that will not betray you, dismay or enslave you/It will set you free, he comes across as feeling completely at a loss during White Blank Page. And then there is Little Lion Man, oozing with regret.

One of the strongest, most impressive songs on the CD is Dust Bowl Dance an angry, exceptional piece of music that probably sums up the entire record best: It starts out slow, gaining speed which each verse, leading to an explosion of noise and sounds halfway through the song before ending just like it started. If it wasn‘t for the occasional piping up of the banjo, the song would almost lose it‘s folksy connotations and sound like a jazz piece.

Unless you completely dislike songs that make sense and have a deeper meaning under their pretty lyrics, hate the sound of banjos or despise London-based bands, there should be no reason for you not to give Mumford & Sons a chance and a listen!