Yup, there’s a Mogwai 2025+ thread and I couldn’t seem to find a Mogwai HGATR thread. so apologies in advance for starting a new Mogwai thread.
Anyway, I picked up their debut album Young Team on CD from a charity shop in a 3 for £1 deal a few weeks back. Whilst I did buy the album on vinyl when it released I never spent much time with it and sold it before the 90’s were out.
I have listened to it quite a lot in the last few days, and it is a debut album of both raw warmth and jagged violence, and what a juxtaposition that is.
Yes! I Am A Long Way From Home with its blurred dialogue intro blunders into a searing launch that threatens to take off yet is held down by its own sheer weight. Almost shoe gaze initially it shows the warning signs very early. on.
More slow and quiet beginnings for Like Herod. Warm pitter patter near Math Rock. A track that repeatedly checks itself, dusts itself off, yet all the while glaring at you, like on a car journey. Almost unexpectedly and quite suddenly it chucks you out of that moving vehicle conjuring up images of being immediately thrown on foot onto a motorway dodging heavy traffic, senses fully up. It retreats before going again, harder this time. Like controlled aggression methodically attacking. A fade that transmits regret somehow yet all the while brutal and indeed beautiful.
Katrien and back to mumbled blurred spoken words layered underneath the music, that music dreamy, distant yet warm. Atmospheric near electronic build to it all - pulling quickly in swirls, round and round. Waves of disorientation, like a musical waltzers, rhythm enters and then it leaves - and you stagger off scratching your head.
Piano led Radar Maker is just a (short) ditty, but it is a breather we need just about now.
A telephone conversation is almost properly audible in the background of Tracy. Chimes and xylophone style instrumentation as the sound goes a touch more widescreen on us. As it rolls you notice that it is building, slowly but surely. Not a million miles away from Boards Of Canada as that xylophone repeats bringing child like memories back intentionally or not. It’s mood is warm yet just like Boards Of Canada carries an eery quality that you do not feel you can fully trust, this is not a criticism, the opposite in fact.
Are they about to piece this whole thing together? Summer is quick to find melody with feels akin to Classical Music before swelling into a monstrous sound perhaps almost too quickly. It steps the fuck back, but have we just seen their poker hand flashed before our eyes (ears)? That unleashing was so powerful that of course they do it again.
With Portfolio and its back to that piano. Samples that remarkably aren’t a million miles away from Ummagumma Pink Floyd lead into startling noises cascading from your speakers. Okay, we didn’t see this coming, almost wildy experimental now, yet it fully belongs.
R U Still Into It almost ridiculously isn’t a Prince song. Aidan Moffat’s spoken words fit too poetically perfectly. A simplicity like The Velvet Underground playing an early Sub Pop slow burner love song - and surely that is just not possible?
A 1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8, the beautifully doom loop of A Cheery Wave From Stranded Youngsters. The down leading keys. It’s too short, but we’ll take it.
Time to end this debut album. Mogwai Fear Satan, and I’m going to say it, it sounds a but like U2. Wait! The high end U2, the rhythm, the guitar style. Of course it exaggerates on this with bleeding guitar, drones, darker and urgent rattles. This is U2, placed in a thick long shag pile carpet. That carpet, containing U2 taken up a very, very, very very, very, very, very, very, high staircase and launched down it with venom and violence and you hearing the agony it causes as Mogwai go for blazing glory with the wryest of smiles on their faces.
Young Team is probably a 10/10 album.
