MEW

Line-up: Jonas Bjerre (vocals, guitar, keyboards), Silas Graae Jørgensen (drums), Bo Madsen (guitar), Johan Wohlert (bass and later guitar). Wohlert left in 2006 but returned back in 2013, Madsen departed for good in 2015, and in 2024 Bjerre announced his departure, effectively ending the band.

My full blossoming into a hapless music nerd happened in the early 2000s (which shouldn't come as any surprise if you pay attention to when many of the artists featured here were active...) and I regularly had my mind blown in various degrees throughout that period as different artists and different types of music arrived in my radar and exposed me to methods of expression that felt brand new to me. One of those was the first time a video from Mew appeared on TV, and what at first sounded like a generally interesting slice of artsier rock soon became downright captivating when the voice appeared: that high, almost genderless vocal that expressed so much melody and emotion while sounding so otherwordly and unlike anything I had heard in front of music like this. When the song itself kept changing shape in unexpected ways, it added to the effect - this was something completely unique and I needed to hear more.

For much of the wider world, including the bulk of the Nordics, Mew seemingly came out of nowhere ca. 2003 but the truth is they had already been an active point of interest in their native Denmark since the late 1990s. Mew had come together as a melting pot of four very different musical personalities who found a shared interest in exploring that fascinating Venn diagram overlap between their respective circles, and their first two albums were released in Denmark alone on a relatively small domestic label. The latter of these, 2000's Half the World Is Watching Me, in particular began to attract attention outside their native country and Mew soon signed a worldwide deal with Sony. For their major label debut, 2003's Frengers the band made the decision to re-record a number of their back catalogue favourites (and songs that deserved better than to be forgotten on albums most people would never hear) alongside some new songs, and I'll get to that in more detail further down this page. But Frengers broke them through all over the place and for the remainder of the 2000s, Mew became one of blogosphere indie's ("indie's", I know - major label and all) Big Name Acts whose every move and album was waited for with an excited breath. Especially so as you truly could never know what would happen next.

Mew, you see, pulled a lot of their magic from their uncompromisingly erratic whimsy that they never dulled down even as they got on a big label roster: in fact, they got even weirder during their Sony tenure. Mew's music is where the fervorous energy of punk and metal shook hands with the melodies and open-armedness of the sweetest pop music, while the neurotic time signature switches of math rock made perfect bedfellows with the most arena-seeking choruses of alternative rock. They were pop and prog but in a way that blended them together until they really were one, and not just one genre with guest features from the other. Mew threw in a myriad of wildly different ideas and the kitchen sink into every album and often every song, fearlessly and proudly creating music that was larger than life both in its vision as well as in its execution: expect regular gigantic crescendos, boldly soaring choruses and humongous explosions of sound. But all these ideas were also put together seamlessly by a stunningly skillful set of musicians who could swiftly and naturally move from style to style, and the end result is something that could only be described as Mew's own, so much so that their early 2000s works absolutely serve as a comparison and a touchpoint for so many other Nordic acts since who followed in their footsteps, though never with the same gusto. Mew also had the benefit of having the aforementioned voice of Jonas Bjerre, whose yearning dreamland vocals added another layer of unique flavour into the music. His characteristically high range lands on the right side of syrupy sweet and transcends quirkiness by becoming a truly evocative tool in the band's arsenal, alongside the oft-surrealistic lyrics that the voice carried. Mew didn't sound like they were really from the same world as all their peers, and that's what made them so magical.

Mew were primarily active around the first decade of the new millennium and then slowly started winding down. Extracurricular activities like family life began to took priority, the band took long hiatuses to the point that each new release felt like an unexpected comeback, and in-between members both left and returned for specific cycles, not out of any bad blood but simply to pursue life's other paths for a while. Mew had arguably said all they had to say in the first fifteen years or so of their career and though that's not dismissive of their later works, it's inarguable that there's less of them and the band simply wasn't a priority anymore for the four members. In autumn 2024, shortly after I started doing these reviews, the then-trio band once again reactivated out of nowhere but only to say that Bjerre had decided to leave the band - which effectively meant the final, conclusive end to the band's uncertain later years. It's made the project to review their discography oddly bittersweet in a fashion (not going to lie, I thought at first they were going to announce a new album and disrupt my review schedule!), but it's also been a powerful reminder of just how special Mew were when they were around. I've bandied the word "unique" a lot in this intro (and erased it several times more in an attempt to not repeat myself), but they truly were something of their own, and their relatively short discography is a truly imaginative journey.

Main chronology:

• 1997: A Triumph for Man
• 2000: Half the World Is Watching Me
• 2003: Frengers
• 2005: And the Glass Handed Kites
• 2009: No More Stories...
• 2015: +-
• 2017: Visuals

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A TRIUMPH FOR MAN

1) Wheels Over Me; 2) Beautiful Balloon; 3) Wherever; 4) Panda; 5) Then I Run; 6) Life Is Not Distant; 7) No Shadow Kick; 8) Snowflake; 9) She Came Home for Christmas; 10) Pink Monster; 11) I Should Have Been a Tsin-Tsi (For You); 12) How Things Turn Out to Be; 13) Web; 14) Coffee Break
2006 Reissue Bonus Disc: 1) Studio Snippet #1; 2) Say You're Sorry; 3) Beautiful Balloon (Acoustic); 4) Web (Demo); 5) Chinese Gun (Demo); 6) Studio Snippet #2; 7) I Should Have Been a Tsin-Tsi (For You) (Demo); 8) Wheels Over Me (Demo); 9) Superfriends (Demo)

Eccentric debut full of raw talent and inspiration, introducing the band's unique personality immediately with lower stakes but just as captivating musical material.

There's a bit in the liner notes for the 2006 reissue of A Triumph of Man about the four different personalities that made up Mew in the studio, recording their debut album: Wohlert favoured the more easily digestible approaches, Bjerre leaned towards "weird softness", Jorgensen pushed towards heavier and harsher sounds and Madsen was the diplomatic assimilator in the middle. What should have been a clash of ideas and directions instead formed a fifth personality entirely, that of Mew as an unified entity which balanced all these instincts. This melting pot of perspectives is perhaps most apparent on the quirky and unfiltered debut. It's an album which bears the sound of a band on the verge of a vision of something and not entirely sure where they should be taking that vision or which fragments to expand, but every single decision they make is uniformly, unarguably and most of all uniquely theirs.

A Triumph for Man is a little scruffy and definitely low-key, with its production which borders on lo-fi aesthetically even if not practically and the audible vibe of a passion project dreamed up in small bedrooms and smaller stages that's about to turn into reality. Between the lines of you can hear what Mew would eventually grow up to become: the cinematically dreamy (and slyly dark) power ballad "She Came Home for Christmas" would eventually be brought back for Frengers and this initial version is about 90% of its grandiose future self already, and in the stadium-fantasising choruses of "Wherever" and the evocative strings of the acoustic and unexpectedly delicate "Snowflake" you can hear the band's future big screen theatrical sensibilities. They're great, predictable as that may be: among the album's best songs. But it's what they're sitting next to that's the most fascinating aspect of the debut. A Triumph for Man is as indebted to 90s shoegaze and slacker rock as it is to twee pop, and the band are throwing these influences in left, right and center as they form what can only be described as the Mew sound. There's some Swirlies DNA involved courtesy of producer and Swirlies member Damon Tutunjian, but the final concoction is Mew's own. That's in no small part thanks to Bjerre's everything from the falsetto-prone voice and melodic ideas to his idiosyncratic lyrics, and when paired with these often surprisingly noisy and heavy textures ("Then I Run", "Panda" and "Wherever" in particular) it's surrealistically beautiful. As if to prove a point, sometimes Mew simply put all of everything into an intrigue-piqueing blender and out comes mirror universe indie hits like "Wheels Over Me" and "Web" which alternative between hits of alternative rock guitars and feather-light frolicing in a genuinely exciting manner.

The other unique flair to A Triumph for Man is the abundance of more overwhelmingly off-kilter ideas that take a step away from what you thought the general vibe would be. That means the existence of not only the various interludes of varying degrees of novelty (the pretty "Life Is Not Distant", the shambling Halloween parade "Pink Monster", the warbling a cappella of "How Things Turn Out to Be"), but also the bouncy bubblegum pop of "No Shadow Kick" where Bjerre sings in a made-up facsimile of Chinese and/or Japanese, like someone singing along to a song in a language they don't know. "I Should Have Been a Tsin-Tsi (For You)" is something close to an early Mew signature song and its whimsical fairytale twee is potently disarming, so much so that it's a stand-out from day one and it's no wonder it hung around for years afterwards: the bursts of sharp falsettos, bright acoustic guitars and its giddily brisk pace is fiersomely adorable as well as dangerously catchy (and no, I don't know what a tsin-tsi is either but I'm picturing a chinchilla-like creature). These strains of thought would eventually get either ironed out or infused into the overall vision, but it's fun to hear them run unshackled here in all of their admittably novelty nature. It's also simply great to hear songs like these interact with the heftier (emotionally or sonically) material, bringing in contrast as much as they highlight the surprising amount of similarities.

A Triumph for Man is slightly rough around the edges - but not like it's left raw, but rather in an untamed manner. It's a testament to the band's imagination and creativity as much as the later, more refined albums: the unique Mew formula is already present and accounted for. Plus, while for the bulk of the review I've been focusing on the sound and whimsy of it all, it's worth just pointing out that the actual writing too is really good all across the album: these songs have strong melodies, great dramatic and emotional arcs and attention-grabbing arrangements. Bjerre's lyrics are no more or less evocatively nonsensical than at any point later and he can already make a line like "I'll try to like horses" (the chorus of the album highlight "Panda") sound like a puncturing sentence that means something and hits with intent, even if the actual meaning is unclear. It's a really fascinating debut album that derives its power both from how much it shares with the albums and how little it does, introducing Mew as unique force of nature. You could maybe make it an even better album by tidying up some of the ramshackliness and sprawl, but that might also end up sacrificing some of its personality. It's rare to hear a debut album where the artist in question has such a distinctively characteristic voice of their own, but the often chaotic but equally exciting smörgåsbord of ideas Mew play with here really is impressive, even if you were to hear this after any of the more famous albums.

The 2006 reissue comes with a bonus disc that which neatly expands upon Mew's early days and wraps up some loose threads. The original demo albums haven't been included in full but instead you get a curated selection of the most interesting material in them: the demo-exclusive songs "Chinese Gun" (fairly throwaway) and "Superfriends" (raw potential), the more chilled-out early version of "Tsin-Tsi" (with some delightfully soft keyboards in place of the big guitar riff rev-up) and more raucous interpretations of "Web" and "Wheels Over Me". There's also a nice acoustic version of "Beautiful Balloon" and, as if to mimic the album's interludes, a few random snippets of studio banter which are unnecessary but cute. The most tantalising inclusion for the established fans is the sole studio outtake of the album, "Say You're Sorry" which according to the liner notes Tutunjan was batting for hard, but ultimately lost the fight with the band and "She Came Home for Christmas" was picked for the album instead. It's a mesmerisingly meandering six minutes of the most textural set of shoegaze guitars across the album, a plaintive cello and Bjerre's wistful vocals - and though I think the band made the right choice between the two songs, it could have easily found a comfortable home on the album and would have been a potential showstopper. It's a small set of extras, but plentiful regardless of length.

Physically: Standard 2-CD jewel case. The liner notes feature a number of photo collages, all the lyrics (apart from "No Shadow Kick", sadly enough), and both studio diary snippets and general reminiscing from Tutunjan which explores the context and details the time in the studio in a candidly honest manner.

[Reviewed: 05/09/2024]

HALF THE WORLD IS WATCHING ME

1) Am I Wry? No; 2) Mica; 3) Saliva; 4) King Christian; 5) Her Voice Is Beyond Her Years; 6) 156; 7) Symmetry; 8) Comforting Sounds
2007 Reissue Bonus Disc: 1) Half the World Is Watching Me; 2) Her Voice Is Beyond Her Years (Live 2001); 3) Mica (Live 2001); 4) Wheels Over Me (Live 2001); 5) Wherever (Live 2001); 6) 156 (Cubase Demo); 7) Quietly (Demo); 8) Comforting Sounds (Do I Look Puerto Rican?) (Demo)

A massive artistic and sonical transformation - and a weird historic relic through no fault of its own.

The unexpected complication that comes with reviewing Mew's discography in order (which I am doing) is that unless you are one of the increasingly small number of people who first heard Half the World Is Watching Me when it was released in Denmark in 2000, you will in all likelihood be coming into this after first hearing Frengers, just like I did. It is no great secret that Mew re-recorded a number of songs from their existing back catalogue for their international "debut" album, five of which come from this album: that's a whopping 62.5% of the tracklist here (and for added fun, two of the remaining songs were re-recorded as b-sides for Frengers). That has a huge impact on how you perceive this album because try as you might to force yourself to think otherwise, it's always going to be the one with all the weirdly unfamiliar versions of the deeply familiar songs from "Frengers". It's difficult to consider Half the World Is Watching Me simply as an album unto itself, as a cohesive piece of work intended to be its own statement rather than just an echo of another.

But maybe it wasn't a statement like that to begin with. Mew spent the next couple of years after A Triumph for Man in a flux: back-and-forth with their label delayed the start of the recording process and in the meantime, the band wrote songs, demoed them, scrapped the demos with a different set of demos and restlessly shuffled through material uncertain of what they ultimately wanted album #2 to ultimately sound like. When they finally arrived at the end of the Half the World Is Watching Me studio sessions (mostly self-produced with some help from Flemming Rasmussen), they scrapped and buried a handful of the songs they'd finished to arrive at the eight that make up the tracklist today. Mew weren't necessarily a band in crisis at this stage, but they were certainly one that was being very indecisive and when they did finally find the right inspiration, they seemingly foregoed the idea of everything fitting neatly together as long as the songs themselves stood up proudly. Whilst it is only eight songs (not counting the ambient sketch "Ending" hidden in the pregap of track 1) it's a wildly diverse bunch and almost haphazardly put together - though part of that is undoubtedly because I'm used to hearing them in a different context, some of the transitions between songs feel so abrupt that it can't all just be in my head.

Right off the bat the changes are noticeable, though. Gone are the scruffy, lo-fi inspired guitars and beautifully noisy production, enter grand gestures and soaring hooks: the band dreamed big on the debut, here they are reaching for it. Everything's a lot more cinematic, ambitious and at times dramatic - the rough edges are gone as Mew embrace their most melodic tendencies and wrap them up in enormous choruses and lush arrangements. It's a night and day difference in comparison to the debut, and though you can trace some of this back to the first album ("She Came Home for Christmas" was pretty much the precursor to everything here) the band may as well be a completely different entity. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the three songs that ultimately didn't make it to Frengers. "Mica" is heavenly bubblegum pop bliss as interpreted by an indie band, the piano-lead "Saliva" is both delicately gorgeous and whimsically giddy as it shifts between its different dramatic movements while losing touch about being a simple pop song, and "King Christian" is all tongue-in-cheek fun which may contain some seriously impressive hooks, but also has a daft spoken word section ("rapped" by the debut's producer Damon Tutunjian). They're huge, open-arms-embracing songs but also decidedly fluffy and twee and loving it - and though the first album had its softer moments they didn't have the sense of bravado and self-certainty these songs radiate. They've earned the cocksureness: "Mica" and "Saliva" especially are simply marvellous, delightfully sweet gems where the melodies are as lush as Bjerre's sugary voice, trained to perfection in the past three years as he weaponises its unique colour.

Still, the big stars are the other five songs that the band were so proud of that they brought them back a few years later to meet bigger audiences. And... I truly am sorry, but it is really impossible for me to not keep comparing these to their famous versions and I wouldn't be surprised if most people stumble onto this album purely because they want to hear how different they are - and this makes this review awkward to read if you don't have the context of Frengers first (maybe read that review first?). The truth is... these versions are not all that different from the later re-recordings for most parts. Each of the five other songs are already unmistakeably themselves, with the main difference mainly coming from how they're not as bombastic as their future versions, with some changes in minor arrangement details and lack of all the extra bells and whistles later on. "Am I Wry? No" is already a aweworthily explosive statement that flicks from vastly different segment to another while never losing track of its grand anthem status, perfectly showcasing just how massively Mew had changed in the interim years; "Her Voice Is Beyond Her Years" has a short piano epilogue waiting at the end but otherwise this dreamy sigh of a wistful dream pop song already has all its beautifully aching pieces in place, including Stina Nordenstam's backing vocals; the colossal end-of-the-world credits roll signature song "Comforting Sounds" waits at the end and though it's not quite as hair-raisingly evocative as it would be the next time around, it's mostly splitting hairs and it's already disarmingly majestic with its carefully built tension and growing, growing release. They're phenomenal songs, no matter how you dress them up and though they never stop sounding out of place in this context, that sensation is wholly forgotten when they sweep you off your feet. The biggest change occurs with "156": after the shockingly pogoing intro unique to this version, the song plays out in spirit like the re-rcorded version does, but the laidback tempo and ethereal vocal tone place it in an entirely different place emotionally. It's the only original version here that's genuinely intriguing as both an archival piece and its own piece of work, and though it took a while to get adjusted to it, the melodies are already there and impeccable. Meanwhile the tender piano ballad "Symmetry" is basically 1:1 identical with its later version, all very hauntingly gentle and lovely, and also here it perfectly demonstrates the odd track order decisions as its hushed last dance of the ball vibe is in such an awkward place between "Comforting Sounds" and "156".

It's a hard one to come to a definitive opinion on: I can't shake off the odd sense of deja vu that's not quite right because such a huge amount of this album is like it's been dragged from a different context, even though chronologically it's the other way around (all the OG Mew fans from 2000 are probably sympathising from the other perspective), and as irrational as that is that makes it feel lesser, or at least less important? But you can't deny the songs. I love Frengers and apart from the question mark that is the version of "156" presented here, all those songs are almost if not just as impressive here. Of the three other songs, "Mica" and "Saliva" are also really wonderful (especially the latter), and "King Christian" is also a fun, good number even if clearly the album's weakest relatively speaking. And when the album keeps hitting you with a hit after hit after hit, you can't really knock it too much. I'd be lying if I said I listened to Half the World Is Watching Me lots - it's definitely more of an interesting archival piece than a true stand-out album in its own coming from my highly biased perspective - but I'd also be lying if I didn't get pulled by the songs wholesale each time I do listen to it. Thanks to subsequent decisions it's become a strange museum piece oft-forgotten by most fans, but if you try to cast your mind to the start of the millennium when this was all there is and we wouldn't know anything about what's to come - well, I can only imagine it would be nothing short of an incredibly impressive transformation of a band with so much talent it can't be contained in one sound.

The 2007 re-issue bonus disc is massive let down, on the other hand. Though the four songs discarded from the album's original tracklist have and will never see the light of day (per the liner notes), this was a period where Mew released their first proper singles, which came with actual b-sides - none of which are found here, apart from the alternative demo version of "Quickly" which is thoroughly fine. Neither can you find the re-recordings of "She Came Home for Christmas" and "You Should Have Been a Tsin-Tsi" which were included in the album's initial reissue shortly after the original release. Instead, the bulk of the very short bonus disc is made out of a number of live songs which are fairly superfluous (great songs, band's in good form, but none of them are anything essential, though it's neat to hear "Wherever" starting to take its form towards the 2003 re-recording), and fairly unexciting demos where the most interesting thing is that early on "Comforting Sounds" featured the line "do I look Puerto Rican?" for some reason. The previously unreleased title track is interesting as a prospect but it's ultimately little more than a rough piano draft of a song, a nice enough intro rather than unearthed treasure. This could have been a whole lot more than it actually is, especially as there's no official b-side/rarities collection to include the additional studio material.

Physically: 2-CD jewel case. The liner notes, too, are a big step down after the first album's similar reissue: the lyrics take up most of the booklet, and the band's comments on the context and recording of the album could easily fit on one page if they were spaced differently. Half the text is almost illegible thanks to the bad font colour choice in contrast to the background. After the debut's reissue, this feels like a very last minute, throw-it-out job.

[Reviewed: 10/09/2024]

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