Mumford & Sons @ The Excel

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Wednesday September 4th was a sold out show at Xcel.  They opened with “Lover’s Eyes” the perfect opener, audio mix was still being tweaked.  “Broken Crown” was the sixth song in & by then it was sounding pure & clean, the horns really do make this band fun to hear.  Very few people were sitting down by middle of the 1st set.  There is something about their banjo, fiddle & hard strumming guitar that takes me away from the good old US of A.

Sandy & I have been big fans for years, hearing “Little Iron Man” live was a treat.  The working class neighborhoods of west London produce some unusual music & musicians, so different from the messages we are used to hearing over here.  There is an underlying anger in a few of their songs, Marcus is a great story teller.  Hard to believe the Sons might be more popular in UK, Australia & Ireland then here but tonight everyone loved these guys.   Difficult to say exactly what kind of music I was hearing, the early material was considered “folk”.   some of those early videos & lyrics had a weird John Steinbeck thing that didn’t make sense to me.

This tour was promoting Babel.  Marcus Mumford did a few songs up on the full drum set and that was a highlight for me.  The band reminded us that night that they played the 400 Bar in 2008- damn, I missed that & would have driven through snow, sleet or a summer rain storm to see that show.  I’ll call them Celtic thunder accompanied by strings & horns.   End of the show they appeared center of the arena & did an acoustic version of Springsteen’s “I’m on fire”.