In case you've never heard the Scottish band Mogwai play live, imagine for a moment standing next to a dozen jet engines roaring at full thrust. Now try to imagine that sound distorted and amplified through a wall of Marshall stacks. It's loud. So loud that you almost wince in pain.
But despite the massive decibels thrown at the crowd -- and much has been made about the loudness of Mogwai concerts -- it's the tension-building lulls, the drawn-out silences and the dark melodies that make the band's music some of the best rock 'n' roll currently being made. Without the delicate counterpoints to their massive walls of sound, Mogwai would be just another post-Nirvana alternative rock band relying on an explosive chorus to hammer their message home.
Instead, there are no readily distinguishable verses, choruses or bridges in Mogwai's songs, just a slow and deliberate construction and eventual violent destruction of a really, really dark ambience. Sometimes the process is in reverse, but with the same results: as the ending guitar and keyboard notes fade out listeners are left staring at their feet and feeling, well, quite miserable.
"I guess we kind of re-popularized slow depressing music," said Stuart Braithwaite last week from his home in Glasgow before laughing heartily -- it surprises most to learn that Mogwai's members are, in fact, a fairly jovial bunch of lads. (They have a reputation for this back home actually, earned in part thanks to concert T-shirts that read simply "blur: are shite.")
Mogwai met in Glasgow in the mid-1990s and recorded one EP before releasing a compilation called Ten Rapid (1997) that had critics falling over themselves in adulation. In the immediate post-grunge hangover, the band's Codeine and Slint-inspired moody sound was so refreshing some inventive (or desperate) journalist even invented the term "post-rock" in large part to apply to the band. This is a slight sticking point with Braithwaite, though.
"I don't really like that term. I think it's a bit wanky to be honest." But the fact that someone felt it necessary to coin a new word to categorize the band's sound is an indication that they were blazing some trails in the world of indie rock.
"It was weird. For a long time we felt a little bit like out on our own. But later there were a lot of bands, not really doing the same thing, but on a similar path. That was nice."
Having raised expectations with Ten Rapid the band followed up with Mogwai Young Team (1997), which was widely praised but which the band itself disliked and then Come on Die Young (1999), a monumental album that begins with a sample of Iggy Pop who says in the middle of a long diatribe: "what sounds to you like a big load of trashy old noise, is in fact the brilliant music of a genius, myself."
It was an audacious way to prelude an album, but it wasn't off mark, as each track built upon the previous with enormous, sweeping soundscapes and wave after wave of melodic distortion. Shortly after the release of this album other bands, notably Radiohead, began to plunder Mogwai's sound, and in most cases make more money from it then they ever did.
Having established themselves among the indie music greats with Come On, Mogwai released Rock Action two years later which became one of those rare instant classics. The inclusion of a string section and keyboards, reminiscent of the band Godspeed! You Black Emperor, mixed with the assault of sonic dissonance makes it one of the masterpieces of contemporary rock.
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