| Mogwai have made a career of playing the enigma. They have consistently managed to straddle a variety of seemingly irreconcilable realms – loud and quiet, punk and classicalist, populist and elitist.
The Glaswegian outfit was born in what now seems like the halcyon days of the early ’90s, a time marked (or marred, as some would argue) by two massive musical movements, one for each side of the Atlantic. On our side, the sudden (and naïve) belief that a messily concocted pastiche of ’70s metal, punk rock, flannel shirts and indie culture would one day soon take over the world; on the other, cool Britannica and all the hedonism (Oasis), melodrama (Pulp) and self-congratulation that accompanied it. Mogwai emerged quickly as a band vehement in its musical opposition to all of this and – possibly more important – as something utterly un-ironic in an age pickled in self-awareness.
They emerged, to paraphrase their once gasp-inducing T-shirts, because they hated Blur. Blur sucked shit and, moreover, any rock star poncy enough to have airs that what they were doing was "important" or "meaningful" might as well roll up on the pub floor to save Mogwai the trouble of knocking them down before they placed a boot in their arse. Mogwai took quiet-loud dynamics to absurd lengths, while eliminating verse and chorus altogether, stretching songs over the 10 minute length with a frequency not seen since the Peter Gabriel-Phil Collins era of Genesis, and marrying gorgeous minimalism with out and out art-noise metal.
Forget vocals, fuck brevity and to hell with harmonies. For all these reasons, Mogwai struck a nerve with people – what Mogwai was doing mattered. It wasn’t some angsty white boy screaming about being a negative creep and it most certainly wasn’t a young, rich and powerful rock star decrying the British class system from which he made his living. This was fucking punk rock.
That was then. This is now. After three full-lengths, numerous singles and a couple of EPs, Mogwai is still playing the enigma. The band’s fourth and latest, Happy Songs for Happy People, is anything but what the title suggests. It is dark, evoking disillusionment, confinement and fear. But for those whose heart skipped a beat when that album’s follow-up single, the 20-minute-plus My Father My King, was released – a single that revealed Mogwai did indeed know where those distortion pedals were all along — this latest album may have been a bit of a letdown.
Happy Songs for Happy People sees the band’s return to broaching heady emotional territory through restraint. Electronics are featured heavily but rarely as the focus, now comprising the majority of the atmospherics. It is one of the shortest albums the band has ever put out, and has left many split over whether the band can take their sound somewhere new or whether the album is unfocused. It offers a distinct example of a group that has played its part in dismantling a genre, in causing debate and disagreement, and (perhaps inevitably) changing the course of music, however subtly. That is to say, Mogwai is punk rock, and, as such, Mogwai must die.
By now, in this article, there should’ve been a quote from the band. You should’ve read something like, "Yeah, me and the boys like a pint," or maybe, "Well, John Cage has influenced us greatly over the years, but so has Britney Spears, so git arsed!" But you haven’t. Why? Because the headline to this piece is the sum of what Mogwai’s Stuart Braithwaite was willing to offer when all of the above was posed to him in question form over the phone. Why the lack of verbosity? In his own words, "We don’t feel we have to justify our existence anymore."
So while media mavens everywhere wallow in their glory days of early ’90s lo-fi homage pop (yes, Guided By Voices wrote a lot of songs, some good – it’s too bad the British invasion bands did them all first) and purveyors of hipness like Magnet roll out the carpet for Elliot Smith in their top 60 albums of the last 10 years (by the way, Elliot, Simon and Garfunkel are touring again, so now might be a good time to get back on the horse), they end up ignoring Mogwai. This is a band that actually protests issues (see their 1998 Sex Pistols name-dropping "No Education = No Future (Fuck The Curfew)" single, or the closing track to 1999’s Come On Die Young, "Punk Rock/Puff Daddy/ANTICHRIST" for examples) so you would think that these boys would have something to say about it all. Eight years in with critical accolades, a rabid fan base, a successful record label and entire audiences suffering hearing damage at their hands, what does Mogwai, via Braithwaite, have to say for themselves? "I dinnae, I cannae say, really." Right then. |
Copyright ©2003 FFWD. All rights reserved.