Mogwai feedback to the future

06/03/06

The Big Album: From the wilds of Lanarkshire to selling out the Royal Albert Hall, Mogwai have been creating a beautiful racket for a decade. 2006 looks to be their biggest year yet, says Leon McDermott

TO those who don’t know their work, Mogwai have a reputation. They’re loud, obnoxious, even. They play songs, most of them instrumental, which last for anything up to 20 minutes, much of which is likely to be a deafening, impenetrable wall of noise. They’re probably quite hairy (most bands who play music like this are). There’s no art to them, just the inchoate rage of people unable to express themselves through more poetic means. These are all true to varying degrees, save for the last one.
As a band, Mogwai have travelled an odd path since they formed in the mid-1990s. At a time when the rest of the country was drooling over second-rate Britpop, Mogwai were attempting something of a different order, and what they lacked in proficiency (lots), they made up for in volume (even more).

Guitarist and vocalist Stuart Braithwaite, bassist Dominic Aitchison, guitarist John Cummings and drummer Martin Bulloch were four (they later became five, with the addition of keyboard player Barry Burns) misfits from the wilds of Lanarkshire who gravitated towards the flickering lights of Glasgow’s indie scene. In the past decade they’ve gone from being regarded as bothersome, youthful noiseniks to the kind of band who can sell out a five-night stint at London’s ICA and follow it up by playing the Royal Albert Hall (the gig is six months away, but is already nearly sold out). Along the way, they have curated festivals (the highly-regarded avant-garde All Tomorrow Parties among them), and have picked up fans as diverse as the producers of Sex And The City, who used their song Take Me Somewhere Nice back in 2003, and Turner Prize-winning artist Douglas Gordon, who recently commissioned the band to score a real-time 90-minute film portrait of football legend Zinedine Zidane. They’ve also made their influence felt on the rest of the music world; it’d be hard to imagine Sigur Ros ever coming up with their own brand of celestial loveliness without Mogwai’s early records acting as a guiding light.

No longer snobbishly dismissed as satellite-town musical thugs (an image the band themselves poked fun at, going so far as having a clothes sponsorship deal with Kappa), Mogwai are bigger than ever, despite the media shifting the musical goalposts while they’ve been away. The short, sharp musical shock is now the flavour of the day. In this climate, Mogwai’s slower, more considered sonic attack stands out even more. (And the fact that they’re now being managed by the dogged Alan McGee probably won’t hinder their commercial chances.)

Mostly their current status is down to the fact that gradually, Mogwai learned not just to create noise, but to harness its potency. Less than a third of their songs involve vocals; instead, the band’s vocabulary has been built through gnomically evocative song titles and increasingly beautiful melodies.

Their second album Come On Die Young and its successor, Rock Action, still stand as the band’s towering achievements; two records which distilled their aesthetic as they expanded their horizons. The latter, in particular, was glorious, its subtle shifts and swooning melodies revealing a new, more gentle approach to their music. Mr Beast, their fifth album, sees them again channel that energy, and though its decibel levels sometimes creep towards the red, even when the band are in full sonic flight they remain anchored in melody, refusing to let noise overwhelm.

Mr Beast opens with Auto Rock, a slow and stately march which focuses on a repeated refrain from Barry Burns’s piano and which builds, adding layer upon layer, until it reaches a frightening density. During the next 40-odd minutes, Mogwai take Auto Rock’s atmosphere as a cue to riff variously on charging, leaden dirges, light guitar and keyboard melodies and undulating rhythms. There are vocals here and there – on the waltz-time Travel Is Dangerous, for example – but they’re often more about adding texture than narrative: Braithwaite’s voice is simply another instrument in the mix. Acid Food’s lovely interlocking melodies make it a country lament, though not as Nashville would know it. At times, as on Friend of The Night, Mogwai return to what they do best – generating tension by stretching a musical progression almost to breaking point.

There are plenty of bands whose stock in trade is noise, and whose instrumental odysseys can seem little more than boyish self-indulgence or the result of not knowing how many effects pedals count as too many. Mogwai, though, know that coherence ought to take precedence over the demands of the ego: if something is short and sweet, it’s for a reason; if something is 10 minutes of fury, likewise. The closing We’re No Here demonstrates this best of all. It’s the fiercest song on the album, though it’s still a curious sort of beautiful: sublime, in the original definition of the word. Like the rest of Mr. Beast, its pleasures lie in its subtleties, and its hulking exterior contains real human warmth.

Mogwai, like icebergs, are all about what’s under the surface. Their reputation might be for guitar terrorism, but that’s to miss what makes them tick: they’re all about revealing the beauty within the noise.

Recommended download: We’re No Here. Rating: 4 stars

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