Description
Label Review.
2017 album.
Our Overview.
Danish art rock trio Mew release their seventh album ‘Visuals’ through Play It Again Sam. Formed of of Jonas Bjerre, Johan Wohlert and Silas Utke Graae Jørgensen and although twenty years into their career the band retain the irrepressible ebullience of a band working on their debut album.
Mew frontman Jonas Bjerre has worked on the projections for the band’s live shows since their early days. Usually, they finish an album and Bjerre gets to work on the visuals. For their seventh record, though, the singer decided to turn things upside down, working on the visuals first and seeing if they informed the music. The resultant record feels like a culmination for one of rock’s most ambitious and inventive groups: Visuals is where Bjerre and his bandmates, bassist Johan Wohlert and drummer Silas Utke Graae Jørgensen, join the dots of a career that has spanned over two decades. “We do everything on this album ourselves,” says Bjerre. “We produced it ourselves, I did the artwork, I’m doing the visuals. Visuals felt like a fitting title. I like the idea that each song has a visual aspect to it somehow.”
Unlike previous albums, ‘Visuals’ arrives fairly quickly on the back of 2015’s ‘+-’. The tour that accompanied 2015’s +- album found the band reaching a creative peak that they felt was too exhilarating to be dampened by a period of extended cave-dwelling. They arrived home with demos that had been written on the road and the spark was lit. They wanted to break the cycle and make an album quickly. “We just felt like, “if we do it the normal way, it’s gonna be another three or four years before we get to do it again’,” says Bjerre. “If you keep doing it like that, ultimately you make a handful of albums and then you’re ready for retirement.” The trio wanted to make an album spontaneously, keeping the energy they’d generated on the road going.
Recorded and self-produced in Copenhagen, ‘Visuals’ was completed in under a year and sees Mew at their most concise, each song representing its own little chapter and narrative.
The first taste of the album comes in the shape of the mesmerising intricacies of the album’s finale ‘Carry Me To Safety’ and the first single ‘85 Videos’ - which from the outset exudes a familiar expansive backdrop, lush instrumentation coupled with rousing vocals, euphoric pop brilliance that is part of Mew’s DNA.