On a forum online, somebody decided to start a thread on overrated music. A lot of bands sprung to mind and I gleefully took part. But as I consulted my own post and those that followed, I began to realize something -- any band could be on there. I mean, somebody put The Beatles on it! Calling something overrated is snobby, but we do it all the time. I was this close to adding Mogwai to the thread as an example, but then I remembered something. I recalled that I got into them around the same time I'd begun gravitating to instrumental rock. And what I liked about Young Team, and instrumental rock in general, was how unassuming it was. The song titles seemed arbitrary, the band-names even more so. The mystique of the rock band became tempered with something more like earnest explorations of and meditations on mood.
And Mogwai were received well, but they weren't necessarily hyped. You either fell adrift to the sounds they were making or you moved along. They were so refreshingly down-to-earth in their approach to making music. There was no gimmick, and their quiet-loud-quiet-even louder exercises in brooding melody demanded little of the listener. It was like the most memorable, stoic drama soundtracks you'd heard given the full guitars, bass and drums treatment. As it happened, the group added vocals more and more prominently for each release, while classy imitators Explosions in the Sky kept the purity of their initial process with just enough touches to keep the sound vital. Not that the addition of vocals were bad for Mogwai. It just seems, muffled or vocoded as they were, that the right guitar sound could've filled those melodies just fine. The purity of their sound became slightly tainted, even if songs like "Hunted By a Freak" essentially push the same buttons.
This collection of BBC recorded live sessions mixes both the sacred and the profane phases of Mogwai's career, as it were, providing a context with which a wayward fan like myself can reassess their feelings about the group's present catalogue. I believe I was tempted to call the band overrated because the dense drama of their sound compels many listeners to proclaim them rock "saviors" and bow to their blistering crescendos as "heavier than god." The occasionally Herculean feats the band manage, such as those in songs like "Mogwai Fear Satan," seem to get people all in an uproar.
They become exclamatory and reverent in a way that is probably better suited to the larger-than-life scenes the songs tend to put in their heads. Listening to these sessions, it has become clear that Mogwai is a group that fares better in personal spaces of the vainglorious human mind than in the back biting realms of exultant testimony. After five albums, three of them solid, it's nice to have this record to see a band whose ambitions are more turned to filling empty spaces of day-to-day drudgery than "changing the way people think about music," or whatever.
The band excels here with their take on patient, brooding waltzes with the spaces between the power chords of your average disaffected pop rock song. It is an unpretentious sound that makes you swoon if you stop to let it. And, come track six, with the whopping eighteen-minute rendition of Young Team's "Like Herod" you can have an experience akin to being dashed against the shore by a giant wave, then just barely getting your bearings only to be dashed down yet again. This is one of their darkest songs, and its bracingly stark sonic crescendos are more powerful than ever in this extended version. The central placement of this song bridges the relative calm of Government Commissions' surrounding tracks quite nicely.
Though I may prefer a strict instrumental approach to the imaginary epics songs Mowai's work evokes, it has to be said that the barely-there vocals of Young Team's "R U Still In 2 It" seem all the more essential when faced with this album's somewhat unimpressionable instrumental version. I'm also inclined to admit here that I consider their fourth LP, Rock Action, to be their most solid release -- and more than half the tunes on there contain vocals in some fashion.
Which brings me to the perplexing inclusion of the Ten Rapid track "Cody" instead of Rock Action's "Take Me Somewhere Nice," a song that utilizes an uncannily similar melodic structure, but to a much fuller end. The Rock Action track that is used, "Secret Pint," while performed with the usual somber grace of these sessions, definitely loses something without the intricate studio touches that made it such a poignant album closer. Something like "Dial: Revenge" might've worked better in its place. But all nitpicking aside, they actually close out the release expertly with Happy Music For Happy People's guazey heavenward march, "Stop Coming To My House."
If Mogwai ever were over-hyped, I suppose it's safe to say that they aren't anymore. They're appreciated as much as music as singularly functional as theirs provides for them to be. The faithful will be rewarded with this immaculately recorded set of live versions, while the release could provide a solid introduction to those who've yet to discover the virtues of having heavy, emotional music that still manages to let you fill in the blanks. These are some of the finer orchestrated soundtracks to the human experience around, unobtrusively making the old-as-time-itself pain and heartache that we feel in our daily lives seem a little less insignificant.
1. Hunted By A Freak
2. R U Still In 2 It
3. New Paths To Helicon Pt II
4. Kappa
5. Cody
6. Like Herod
7. Secret Pint
8. Superheroes of BMX
9. New Paths To Helicon Pt I
10. Stop Coming To My House
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