Mumford & Sons "Sigh No More" [2009]

If you feel life is too short and you're looking for ways to lengthen it, play one of Mumford & Sons' three-and-a-half-minute tracks from "Sigh No More" and you'll feel like you just spent a year and a half at a gig by a hillbilly CSN&Y cover band. Perhaps this is considered an exotic flavor in the UK -- a region not exactly known for its palate -- but how Mumford & Sons managed to win Grammys can only be a testament to the horror show that is the modern American music industry. If folk music was this pretentious and overbaked when it first emerged in the middle of the 20th century, it never would have been allowed to poison the well of contemporary music in the first place. Perhaps Mumford & Sons is providing a service of sorts: burying this dubious form of "entertainment" six feet under would be a fitting demise after so many years of useless string instruments and patchouli oil. Now if we can only get these wankers to stop releasing new material…