Mumford & Sons, Wilder Minds - album review: ditching the banjos leaves an absence of both intrigue and oomph

The Londoners sound more U2 and Coldplay than ever before

The Londoners sound more U2 and Coldplay than ever before (Jon Lawrence)

Never mind the banjos. W­hatever prevailing wisdom claims, bucolic put-ons were never the main beef with Mumford & Sons. Get past the bumpkin drag and their problem is a critical case of the Keaneplays, a weakness for nebulous rousing sentiments in anthemic packages. Gentlemen of the road’s middle, they be: so although Mumfords’ rock-ist third album ditches banjos, there’s still nothing here to scare the horses, or whatever other animals they kept nearby in the farmhand years.

Alarm bells ring as soon as “Tompkins Square Park” layers martial beats with chiming guitars, all anthemic roads leading back to U2 by way of Bono’s offspring. “Believe” couldn’t be more Coldplay-like if it consciously uncoupled Gwyneth Paltrow, its epically shimmering keyboards conveying festival-farmed lyrical uplift (“Open up my eyes/ Tell me I’m alive”).

Aping recent Kings of Leon (so, U2 again), Marcus Mumford leaves his Irish-folk years behind and adopts a transatlantic burr for “The Wolf”, whose chugging riff and sappy lyrics (“You are all I’ve ever longed for”) pinpoint the album’s core failings: absences of both lateral intrigue and the elemental oomph its track-titles (“Broad-Shouldered Beasts”, indeed) hint at.

Then it comes, with grim inevitability: the earnest ballad stretch, initiating a slump that extends to the drive-time soft-rock of “Ditmas” and “Only Love”, where the epic crescendo arrives like a contractual obligation wearily fulfilled. “Didn’t they say that only love will win in the end?,” croons Mumford. And the sense that the Mumfords have nothing interesting of their own to say lands with a dulling thud.