The Lumineers – Cleopatra (2016)

I was introduced to The Lumineers by Spotify. Spotify suggests songs based on the songs you have listened recently and my list got some songs by The Lumineers pretty much every week a couple of years ago. I found myself often listening to a song and nodding along to it and when I checked what it was, it was often The Lumineers. I then decided to buy their debut album when I found it with an affordable price at a record store in London. To be honest, I haven't listened to that album that much since I bought it. I really like it, but for some reason it didn't really spark enough interest that I would've selected that album out of all of my albums. This second album I decided to buy purely because it was on sale with £3. However, I have really enjoyed listening to this album especially now that I was about to write this blog post.



The Lumineers is, along with Mumford & Sons, one of the biggest acts in the new coming of folk music in this decade. The songs are quite commercial, but the sounds are really nice and the songs are also fairly entertaining, so I can't really complain. Who wouldn't want to gain commercial success? Well, maybe some other bands. Anyway, The Lumineers has been partly responsible for taking Americana folk again to the mainstream.

The album starts with a slow folk song in the song Sleep on the Floor. The echoey and sharp electric guitars along with punchy tambourines kind of remind me of some Band of Horses songs. Ophelia is a hit song with very echoey vocals. It's certainly a catchy song, but there's something in the sounds that makes it a bit plastic for my taste. Same could be said of the title-track Cleopatra. I like the indie rock style of this folk song and it certainly reminds me of some Mumford & Sons hits. Gun Song is a slow folk song with steady drum beat reminding me of the deep south of the US. It sounds like a modern ode to old Western movies. Angela is one of my favourite songs on the album. There's some genuine folk attitude in this song and I like the fact that it's mostly just played with acoustic instruments. Gale Song is like a lost Mumford & Sons song. The echoey electric guitar sounds really big even if it is the only thing in the background of the vocals. It already sounds on the album like it could be performed at a huge stadium. Long Way from Home sounds a lot like another Americana band, The Head and the Heart. There are some old school folk stylings in the song, but it would sound even better played on an acoustic guitar. My Eyes is a bit more experimental when it comes to the production and I think that pays off. The song sounds a bit more authentic than some other songs on the album, although, here and there, the song seems a bit stretched. The album ends with a beautiful instrumental bit Patience played with a piano.

The album cover is a photo of the actress Theda Bara, who acted in a 1917 film about Cleopatra, of which only about 20 seconds exist anymore. It seems crazy that so much of that time's film history has been lost forever. Most of Bara's career has been acted in now long lost films. I don't know why the band decided to choose this image as the album cover, but there are likely some interesting reasons for this. Do let me know if you know.

The Lumineers have brilliantly cinematic music videos. The music video for Sleep on the Floor looks like a movie trailer. It's about a man and a woman who escape a party on an adventure around the US with a car. There are sequences of love, happiness, sorrow and sadness. They fall in love and decide to get married, but in the end of the video the woman wakes up on the floor of the party where it all started. I don't know about the story, but visually it looks amazing.

I can only say that The Lumineers is a nice modern Americana folk band. They're not really anything new or exciting, but they have decent songs. Some bands say they would rather raise strong opposite opinions than be bland, not hated by anyone, but also not really loved by anyone, but I feel like The Lumineers is exactly the kind of band that doesn't raise any extreme feelings.

Listen to the album on Spotify.