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Just what the world needed: Mumford & Sons put into a blender with Fleet Foxes, served with an Arcade Fire garnish— it's like a late-aughts hipstercocktail. The strings accent idyllic expositions that sound like they came down from some cabin in the woods, despite Dry the River hailing from London. Though, in all fairness, frontman Peter Liddle was born and raised in Norway, a country often held responsible for tempered songs of desolation. The religious overtones are excruciatingly heavy-handed at times — lots of talk about Bethlehem, rosary beads, and Shaker hymns, but not for a moment do you doubt the sincerity of Liddle's laments. Perhaps his Active Child-like falsetto sells it, or the sweeping soundscapes that remain mostly at a gentle soar, but it works on almost all levels. Sure, there are some iffy metaphors bandied about, in particular a play on the old, "Does a tree falling in the forest make a sound if no one is around to hear it?" Liddle gets a pass on stuff like this because in the same song ("Weights & Measures") he'll drop a thing of beauty like, "Baby, there ain't no sword in our lake/Just a funeral wake."
