Today's Pick

Mumford & Sons has unveiled the music video for their track "Hopeless Wanderer," the most recent single off of Mumford & Son' Grammy winning sophomore album "Babel," but fans won't get to see any of the band members in it. Instead, they will be treated to the funny antics of four comedians from former "Saturday Night Live" cast members Jason Sudeikis, Jason Bateman, Will Forte and Ed Helms as stand-ins for the band members, and in the process proves the British folk rockers have a great sense of humor. The result is by far the best Mumford & Son video yet, and it quickly went viral.
"Hopeless Wanderer" finds frontman Marcus Mumford longing for loved ones left behind whilst on the road. The track originated with a piano part created by the band's Ben Lovett when the group was staying in a small house in Nashville, Tennessee in early 2011. "My bedroom was right next to the living room, where we had a little setup," recalled Mumford to American Songwriter of overhearing Lovett tinkering the ivories. "I was in bed, hungover, and I thought, 'F**k, I need to get in that room, because that sounds amazing.' We wrote the song that day."
The clip all opens calmly enough, with the sun's glare and a muted color palette obscuring who might actually be performing. It's totally plausible that Mumford & Son would be the stars of this show. Until the one-minute mark, when it's revealed that lip-syncing along to the words from the song, is the aforementioned comedic quartet, satirizes the band members, from their outfits to even the necessary facial hair and old-timey clothes to pull off the routine. From their respective stringed instruments down to the way the band performs their heart out, the funny men give on the dot impressions.
The four do a convincing enough job of pretending to play things such as the piano, guitar, banjo, stand-up bass, and accordion. Not that there isn't a decent amount of foolery; Sudeikis, as Marcus, struggles to play guitar while carrying a bass drum on his back; the four also squeeze into a tiny boat while playing in the middle of a pond. The emotion of it all starts to peak as tears are shed and kisses are exchanged. But there are still beers to to cheer and instruments to bust up in a barn-burning finale highlighted by Bateman's banjo picking and Forte's bass. They do give a new meaning to the hook, "Hold me fast/ Hold me fast/ Cause I'm a hopeless wanderer."

Mumford & Sons get repetitive and the formula works as they deliver another energetic performance in the music video for their new single "Babel," title track and the fourth single from English indie folk rock band's sophomore album, which won the Grammy Award for Album of the Year. No surprises, just more singalong anthems for fair-weather festival-goers. It's a beautiful twist on a performance video and one that captures the passion and enthusiasm frontman Marcus Mumford, pianist Ben Lovett, banjo player Winston Marshall and bassist Ted Dwane all bring to their playing.
Mumford & Sons' folk-tinged, banjo-plucking austerity indie has made them rich and successful beyond their wildest dreams. And "Babel" bowls along with the ebullient energy one expects of Mumford & Sons, like a cider-soused hoedown at an after-hours lock-in. They are the epitome of a Marmite band, vilified for their privileged background and narrow vision of folk music, celebrated for their spit'n'sawdust energy and biblical framing of love. "Babel," is more than just a decent nu-folk album, but also a great pop album, will only entrench these positions. They manage to play loudly and boisterously, without ever making the descent into cacophony.
The title-track, a mandolin stomp-thrash, opens proceedings with Mumford claiming "I ain't ever lived a year better spent in love." This seems to serve as a conceptual thread for the album as a whole, as successive songs track the turbulent progress of his heart. The title-track was named after the Genesis story about the origin of different languages. String bassist and guitarist Ted Dwayne told Rolling Stone that the song speaks about human discontent, one of the themes of the Biblical account of the Tower of Babel.
Though the title-track forcefully kicks-open the door to their Grammy-winning No.1 album, the new clip settles for an intimate and stripped-down atmosphere. Shot in San Francisco, the Sam Jones-directed black-and white clip sees the folk-rock quartet on an infinite loop, with each pouring his entire body into the music on every glimpse, performing the song in a derelict music hall, while a camera swirls around in a circle to catch them over and over again in different aspects of performance mode. Despite no audience, Mumford & Sons play with enough ferocity and stomping to tear down the metaphorical walls and sings about in the bridge of the track. It shows just how unending their cycle truly is, and well, it works on an entirely different level.

As if "Marcus Mumford joins a motorcycle gang" wasn't already a strong-enough concept for a music video, Mumford & Sons offer three extra plot lines in their newly-premiered music video for their latest single, "Whispers In The Dark," the third single off English folk rock band's latest critically-acclaimed sophomore album, "Babel," which won the Grammy for 'Album of the Year' last month and has sold two million copies to date.
This anthem call finds the frontman Marcus Mumford singing: "I'm a cad but I'm not a I'm not a fraud. I set out to serve the Lord." Speaking to the Big Issue, Mumford responded to the interviewer's question about the seeming religious undertones to the lyrics. "I don't even call myself a Christian," he added. "Spirituality is the word we engage with more. We're fans of faith, no religion. We're just writing songs that ask questions. Sometimes the best way to go about exploring a question, things we wouldn't necessarily talk about in conversation, is by writing a song."
When people think of Mumford & Sons as a throwback act, they mean that they use instrumentation and an aesthetic that dates back to the roots of American folk, country, and bluegrass. But when it comes to music videos, they are similarly old-school, in the sense that they really seem to be trying to make the sort of clips one of the biggest-selling rock bands in the country is supposed to make. It's the sort of classy, adventurous, vaguely artsy video that you used to expect from the likes of Coldplay, R.E.M., or whoever else was at the top of the rock heap at the moment, and Mumford & Sons are wearing that hat quite nicely.
Taking the de rigueur concept of the "live video," Mumford & Sons' members are preparing for a big gig in Jim Canty-directed clip, which is split into four small frames offers different stories of how four quadrants reache their destination and make their way to their sold-out arena shows, with Mumford riding a chopper to the show and going all "Rebel Without a Cause," Ben Lovett waking up in a parked car, Ted Dwane gazing wistfully at the sea before heading over to his show, and the eternally-rumpled Winston Marshall stepping out of a freshly-pressed suit and into a tattered costume. The four meet up at the end of the clip as the corners come together.

Mumford & Sons have dropped a stunning and cinematic clip supporting their latest U.K. single, "Lover of the Light," the second single from the British indie folk band' latest extremely successful sophomore studio album, "Babel." Mumford & Sons don't do anything halfway, and their new video for "Lover Of The Light," is proof that the four-piece English folk collective puts just as much work into the concept of their videos as they do their epic brand of folk music.
All the classic Mumfy essentials of the song are there: marvelous, sweeping crescendos; lead singer Marcus Mumford's grainy, powerful vocals; great, swelling, uplifting emotional buildup. No exception for "Lover of the Light." This boisterous bluegrass banger has been a regular in Mumford & Sons' live sets since early 2010. Keyboard player Ben Lovett told NME: "With 'Lover of the Light,' people would say to us, 'Oh, I can't wait to hear that chorus on record.' But what they really meant by that is they can't wait to hear what they've already heard." It's a gorgeous piece with lovely cinematography set to one of Babel's best tracks.
One can be blind and still be a "Lover of the Light," that seems to be the moral to the story in the Mumford & Sons' new video, which features actor Idris Elba, who stars and makes his directorial debut as a blind man who suffering at his unhealthy disconnection from nature and finds true happiness in the light. This is a visually impressive video that carefully mirrors the timbre of the swelling and dynamic thoughtful uptempo tune.
Filmed in Pembrokeshire, Wales, the video follows a blind Elba seeking personal fulfillment in the great outdoors as he goes through his morning routine and explores the near by wilderness, his confidence surges until he arrives at a cliff side and yells his heart out to the ocean. He is all boundless joy and energy, rapturous. In a world of darkness, he loves the light. A somber and reflective Mumford strains, "Watch me stumble over and over." It has faithful Mumford fans wiping their eyes and scratching their heads.