Mogwai

The Scottish band Mogwai, founded by guitarist Stuart Braithwaite together with Dominic Aitchison (bass), John Cummings (guitar) and Brendan O’Hare (drums), rose to prominence after a handful of EPs with their landmark debut album, "Young Team" (1997), a true archetype of that brand of post-rock built on long guitar-driven pieces alternating soft, dilated passages with outright explosions of sonic fury, following the classic "loud-quiet-loud" formula.

Their model is clearly the American band Slint, from whom they borrow the formula of instrumental rock punctuated by rare vocal interventions bordering on spoken word. The opening "Yes! I'm a Long Way from Home", for instance, begins as a bucolic ballad, driven by a melodic bass line and understated six-string touches, until the instrumental tension builds and a heavily effected guitar bursts in. Yet this intervention doesn't strip the track of its melodic character, and in fact shows a very controlled use of distortion.

This, however, is merely an introduction to the band's true stylistic manifesto: the long odyssey of "Like Herod". It opens as softly as the first track, though more tense thanks to the drums' circular neurosis, and then, just when everything seems to have settled into stillness, a devastating riff bursts in, verging on metal, backed by a renewed surge from the rhythm section. Once the climax subsides, a new calm returns, now resembling the lull before the storm, and it is indeed swept away again by an explosion of feedback and percussion. After this earthquake, the track slowly fades out, like a flow of sonic lava solidifying after the eruption.

The track stands as a true manifesto of Mogwai's dramatic art, capable of building thriller-like atmospheres out of menacing silences and controlled outbursts of majestic guitar fury, while also highlighting the differences from the Louisville masters. Mogwai are less cold and restrained, far more melodic, showing a desire to play with rock's tropes even as they dismantle them, but also a spontaneous, visceral ethic entirely built on a representation of emotion unmediated by reason. The biggest difference from Slint is indeed that here we're in less cerebral, less alienating territory, one instead devoted to registering, with ruthless sincerity, emotional journeys that need not necessarily reach resolution but can dramatically build tension and pathos only to burn out and start the process over again with the next track. What's striking is the use of distortion and dissonance not so much in a noisy or disturbing key, but in a pictorial one, playing on refined timbres and the tactile effects of sound, bringing them close to the aesthetic of the shoegaze movement that had swept England at the start of the decade. The result is a kind of blockbuster for lonely bedrooms, free of baroque flourishes or narrative ambition.

Hence further rollercoasters of guitar dynamics like "Katrien" and "Summer", driven by simple melodic phrasing and the interplay of dynamics created by the rhythm section and the flaring of distortion. The former also features vocals, though reduced to an incomprehensible mutter that ends up serving merely as an extra layer in the track's sonic fabric, helping the guitar build a nervy, emotionally draining crescendo. "Tracy", on the other hand, offers a more intimate atmosphere closer to what the band would explore on later records, built on a simple glockenspiel phrase echoed by bass and drums, against a backdrop of distant, glacial echoes. Still, we're closer here to ambient territory than to the straightforward ballads that would take the place of a track like this on 2001's "Rock Action" and 2003's "Happy Songs For Happy People".

Certainly, the introverted, depressed mood of the early years of the new millennium — which would go on to see the triumph of the arctic mists of Iceland's Sigur Ros, but also the amniotic Radiohead of “Kid A” — is already anticipated here. The hedonism of Britpop, meanwhile, already seems a distant memory (fortunately, Mogwai would say), and the very axis of British music shifts from London to Glasgow, as if there were a need for a more intimate setting, suited to cathartic outbursts and warm shelter from the chill of the approaching millennium.

“With Portfolio” acts as the record's watershed moment, its limpid piano phrase gradually devastated by electronic distortions racing from one speaker to the other, in a disturbing, mocking exercise that leads into “R U Still Into It”. This track picks up and completes the album's atmospheric strand, offering slowed-down folk and the voice of Aidan Moffat of Scotland's Arab Strap, in an exercise that strengthens Mogwai's ties to their fellow slowcore travelers and to a shared conviviality of melancholy and passion born in the pubs of Glasgow's university district at the close of the century.

The two minutes of the piano-led “A Cheery Wave With Stranded Youngsters”, finally, are a small abyss of unease that preludes the final apocalypse. “Mogwai Fear Satan” is in fact the record's second majestic peak, after “Like Herod”, as well as the most representative track of Mogwai's early period, the one by which fans would come to identify them despite their various stylistic turns. Here, over an obsessive, pounding rhythmic base, true walls of distorted guitars rise up, with the same motif taken up in turn by the bass, the guitars and finally a flute that comes to color the pauses between each swell of the electric tide with mystery, especially the magical closing coda. It all builds into a long psychedelic mantra, adding up to more than fifteen minutes of cathartic trip and emotional release, complete with a final sense of relaxation and fatalism.

It's the small epic of alternative youth of the era, perhaps a little off the beaten track from the epicenter of London coolness, but nonetheless in need of warming its heart ahead of the cold to come.

Mogwai are thus capable, like progressive bands, of building long, intricate tracks using rich (as will become clearer later in their career) and classically-minded instrumentation, but their choice to do away with vocals sets them apart from the narrative bent of certain figures in that movement. The musical shifts within the tracks are in fact also abrupt changes of mood, often veering into hysteria or, conversely, depression: this dynamic derives from Slint and the hardcore scene that preceded them, and a Sonic Youth influence is likely too. Above all, attitude matters most, for a band that would go on to title “Punk Rock” the opening track of their next album, despite it having absolutely nothing to do with the Sex Pistols and the like — the point being that whatever is made with heart and gut, for the sheer pleasure of making music, is as punk-rock as the music of 1977, regardless of the musical forms chosen.

Finally, the atmospheric yet thunderous sweetness owes a debt to My Bloody Valentine, while the torrential flow derives from both new psychedelia (Bardo Pond) and old (Pink Floyd), though here any hope of “mind expansion” has been lost. It amounts to a bold synthesis, resulting in a decidedly more humanistic and lyrical version of the band behind “Spiderland”, replacing the Americans' psychological drama with a compressed, typically British emotionalism.

The difference from the neo-psychedelic bands who, not by chance, were finding success in the late '90s — think of Mercury Rev and Flaming Lips — is that Mogwai are deadly serious, not given to playing with kitsch or dabbling in an array of musical forms, staying true to their minimalism even when tempted by the chance to broaden their sonic palette. For this reason they will never reach the grandiloquence of another band, Godspeed You Black Emperor!, who would start from similar premises but end up building actual symphonies.

In conclusion, this album can be seen as a deeply restless synthesis of a musical decade, the '90s, which had opened with two shattering records: the aforementioned “Spiderland” and My Bloody Valentine's “Loveless” — two sonic worlds between which early Mogwai find a crepuscular middle ground. While the formula of “Young Team” would spawn an entire musical lineage (among its heirs one can certainly count Explosions In The Sky), Mogwai lay the groundwork for a sonic path that is, all things considered, humble in its pursuit of melody and pure feeling — the timeless objects of rock — never posing as the avant-gardists they are not, but striving to reach a fairly common goal in original, modern ways: it may not sound like much, but it is.

The album was reissued in 2008, with all tracks remastered and the addition of live tracks and outtakes.

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21/09/2008