Pages tagged “mugiboogie”

When Örn Elías Guðmundsson, a.k.a. Mugison, took the stage at Mercury Lounge on Saturday night, he was not, as may have been expected, covered in blood and dirt, nor was he riding a giant gray horse. No, Iceland’s alterna-rock darling du jour and Paste Best of What's Next artist was just a boyishly handsome thirtysomething in a red cowboy shirt and cuffed jeans, with a bird-crest puff of dark blond hair, clean as a whistle.

Mugison, the Icelandic rocker with the eccentric sense of humor, just announced nearly a dozen dates for his fall U.S. trek, his first true American tour after the occasional stray show here and there. Born Örn Elías Guðmundsson, Mugison is touring to support his third studio album, Mugiboogie, which was released in his native Iceland last year (where it quickly became a commercial and critical success) but finally made it stateside back in July. With songs like "Jesus is a Good Name to Moan" and "Two Thumb Sucking Son of a Boyo," Mugison's music definitely has an endearing oddness to it.

Icelandic musician cooks up rock pastiche for the padded-cell set

If you dumped blues, power pop, psych rock and heavy metal into a transmogrifying machine, the machine would rumble mysteriously, then spit out a brightly colored block of a hitherto unimagined polymer known as Mugison. The one-man band’s guitar-and-computer pastiches have earned him the highest mainstream accolades in his native Iceland, which implies that the Icelandic mainstream is a bit more tolerant of unabashed weirdoes than its U.S. counterpart. At its best, Mugiboogie sounds a bit like Spoon, if they were kind of insane and way into Primus. Heavy-metal screams round off into blues sneers over crispy-fried guitars, with the kind of spazzy rabidity that’s synonymous with Ipecac label head Mike Patton. On this prismatically diverse album, there will come a moment—perhaps during the surprisingly self-descriptive psych-rock stomper “Jesus is a Good Name to Moan,” or perhaps during its prog-metal foil, “I’m Alright”—when you think, “Let’s all take a deep breath.” Personally, I prefer Mugison when he’s mellower and more centered (as on languid, synthetically symphonic folk tune “Deep Breathing”). But you gotta admire a guy with the sack to name his George Harrison rip-off/homage—wait for it—“George Harrison.”