Sunday, 05 October 2008
Be Your Own Herd? Follow Your Own Star?
Now on their 6th album, the world has changed around Mogwai, yet Mogwai have remained resolute, evolving but unchanging : the mainstream has come to them - of a sort - through the appropriation of a similar style of music from other acts : bands that concentrate on moving away from the convention of melody and chorus/verse/solo to producing a music that operates in a different sphere of evocative, occasionally minimalist riffing. Mogwai, as an ethos, align themselves to a punk rock ethic of following your own muse, going where you want. Musically, “The Hawk is Howling” could best be described as a jazz metal drone LP. (Not a CD or a download, an LP, an old fashioned 33rpm vinyl disc that took up too much space when you had thousands of them.)
Face it, crazy it as it sounds, I actually have a music room. A whole room in my house made of CD’s and LP’s and cassette tapes. That’s how ace music is. It’s better than anything.
Anyway, “The Hawk is Howling” is a giant from these fiercely individual innovators. Production values have gone up - the songs sound slicker and wider than ever, but the songs themselves are still uncompromised. As long as you don’t mention the words S**** R** or P*** R***, you should be OK. Mogwai really have very little to do with any of those words, except that their music is largely instrumental. They’re out there, maybe on their own, maybe not, navigating some unusual path of their own, and they don’t give a monkeys what you or anyone else think.
Follow the herd if you want, or be your own herd.
After a couple of years working on well-paying and relatively quick movie soundtracks, Mogwai return - though they never went away - with an album of effortless style. For starters, if nothing else, any band that produces songs called “Batcat” and “I Love You, I’m Going To Blow Up Your School” demonstrates a certain imagination miles beyond any band that has a song called say “”Baby Don’t Go”. Unless it’s called “Baby Don’t Go Unless You Want To Wake Up To Find I’ve Destroyed Your Town And The Horse You Rode In On”. Maybe. Because revenge is the best revenge.
You will never hear a Mogwai song coming from a mobile phone or a tinny car stereo. Mogwai fans have too much taste for that kind of rubbish.
Songs here are dense instrumentals - where the stuff not played is as important as what is - designed to transport the listener to somewhere else : in effect, this material allows the listener to project anything they want into it, both being meaningful and meaningless. If you want to imagine, say, the last 30 seconds of any Black Sabbath song played at 11rpm, shorn of vocals, and well, that’s most of the album : heavy, but light. Whoa. “The Sun Smells Too Loud” is something new for Mogwai : it’s almost cheerful ; an upbeat 7 minute meditation on a handful of musical motifs that sound like a perverse holiday jingle.
The album hits a mid pace dip - think, if you will, of the inevitable point in any movie where someone has to draw a graph and explain exactly whats going on, if you’ve seen Back To The Future II - but aside from that, it’s a mere moment of calm before a storm. The final three songs on the album work abck to a gentle fury that blows itself out. So, “The Hawk Is Howling” comes to a close and Mogwai disappear off into the distance, a golden sunset with Indiana Jones and James Bond and Dan Ackroyd’s butler. But is the album any good?
Hmm. Yes. Glorious, instrumental landscapes that allow you to project whatever your imagination desires upon it in a maelstrom of uncompromising, evocative music. Set your flux capacitators to stun.Only registered users can write comments.
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