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'Wilder Mind' is the de-Mumfordization of Mumford & Sons

When the members of British quartet Mumford & Sons began their initial chart ascent in early 2010, their competition was outsize pop acts such as the Black Eyed Peas, Lady Gaga and Justin Bieber. Mumford & Sons were a novelty, pastoral folkies whose every song sounded as if they had recorded it dressed in tweed jackets with elbow patches. They might as well have been aliens.

The band has since sold about 7 million records, won a Grammy for album of the year (for 2012's "Babel"), played the White House and ushered in a not-entirely-welcome nu-folk revival that made stars of acts such as the Lumineers and Of Monsters and Men.

"Wilder Mind," Mumford & Sons' third studio album, is the sound of a band trying to distance itself from its imitators and from a distinct sound that may have run its course. Everything about Mumford & Sons that you loved, loathed or were indifferent to has either been downsized or inflated to overscaled-but-still-recognizable-proportions. The band members' fondness for quiet verse/loud chorus-style arrangements is not as pronounced, their biblical allusions not as overt; their banjos, symbols of either everything fresh or insufferable about them, have been benched in favor of electric guitars and synths.

The band plays a sold-out show June 17 at Montrose Beach in Chicago.

"Wilder Mind" is a melodic, middle-of-the-road rock album from a band that used to make melodic, middle-of-the-road folk albums. It lacks hip-hop samples, electro beats or any other hollow shorthand signifiers artists use to indicate a Dramatic Change In Direction. It's comparable to Taylor Swift's "1989," another seismically different album that sounds more like a natural progression with every listen.

Mumford & Sons has always had a love of cathartic, rafter-rattling hooks, part of the reason its incremental journey from folk to arena rock makes a certain kind of sense, even as it robs the group of much of what made it novel. The band members, in occupied territory for the first time, sound lost. It's as if they went looking for themselves and found Coldplay instead.

For a generation of English public school kids raised on U2, sounding like Coldplay is inevitable; it's a default factory setting. Both bands are constants throughout "Wilder Mind," imitated in spirit and style, particularly on the echoey, cavernous "Believe," which is Coldplay cosplay, with an uncanny approximation of the Edge on lead guitar.

The group casts its net wide, drawing from the golden ages of any number of British and American rock bands: "Only Love" builds to a frenetic fade-out that recalls vintage Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers. "The Wolf," taut and angular, and the equally great opener "Tompkins Square Park" suggest any number of circa-2000 post-punk revival acts.

Other tracks, such as the rangy new waver "Ditmas," reflect the likely influence of Aaron Dessner, guitarist for the National and friend of the Mumfords, in whose Ditmas Park, Brooklyn, studio the new album was partly made. "Ditmas" is a stunner, a meta-textual breakup song ("Don't tell me that I changed / Because that's not the truth") atypically unafraid to throw an elbow.

Not everything works. "Just Smoke" is a wan exercise in space twang with an especially unappealing come-on ("Lay down your head on my sunken chest"). The songs on "Wilder Mind" are as immediately appealing as any the band has done, but also more forgettable. The heavier instruments provide bulk, but ultimately no heft.

The new collection is a curious thing: half happy love songs, half breakup songs; more modern than the band's past albums, but still painstaking and formal in its language; at once more lofty (there's at least one Edna St. Vincent Millay reference) and more carnal. The band's usually plentiful religious metaphors are whittled down to practically nothing, part of the strange de-Mumfordization of Mumford & Sons. Everything else familiar has been run to the ground.

"Wilder Mind," the latest release by Mumford & Sons.
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