Mogwai: Young Team [Deluxe Edition] (original) (raw)

For a mostly instrumental band, Mogwai have developed a reputation in the media for being big mouths who take no small delight in slagging other bands (hey guys, how about a 10th-anniversary reissue of those "blur: are shite" t-shirts?) and praising themselves. However, the spoken-word intro-- a friend reading out a gushing student-paper review of an early Mogwai performance-- that ushers in the slow-burn rapture of Young Team's "Yes! I Am Long Way From Home" feels less like a cheeky self-aggrandizing device than a rejection of the hollow Britpop hyperbole that was endemic to the era. But if Mogwai were determined to distance themselves from prevailing retro-rock fashions, Young Team evinced a nostalgic streak of its own, particularly for the pre-Britpop moment of 1988-91, when indie rock bands both American (Slint, Mercury Rev) and British (My Bloody Valentine, Bark Psychosis) were obliterating the parameters of rock music (and the VU meters that quantify them), before those groups either dissolved or turned more classic rock. So in a sense, Young Team was tending to unfinished business, bridging the continuum the connects shoegaze psychedelia to the anti-pop aesthetic and rhythmic thrust of the then-emergent post-rock.

But, of course, what distinguished Mogwai from the multitude of all-instrumental outfits jockeying for a Thrill Jockey deal was that their post-rock actually rocked. And to this day, nothing in their catalogue attests to this fact more than Young Team's startling second track, "Like Herod". Even when you heard it the first time, you knew the song's silently stalking momentum-- guided by Dominic Aitchison's deceptively melodic bassline-- would trigger an eruption of heavy-metal thunder that sounded like Slint soundtracking the shower scene in Psycho. But the tension lies not in question of whether the bomb is going to drop, but when, and this re-mastered reissue does a superb job of prolonging that feeling of impending doom-- during the song's second quiet stretch, you can hear Stuart Braithwaite and John Cummings' fretboard taps panning back and forth in the mix, like an unseen predator taunting you from some unseen location in the shadows before going in for a particularly savage kill. And after 11 years, I'm still never quite prepared for it.

At 11 minutes, "Like Herod" is actually only Young Team's second longest song; that honour belongs to 16-minute closer "Mogwai Fear Satan". Rather than resorting to sudden dynamic shifts, Young Team's colossal closer masterfully layers sheets of distortion, percussion and flute swirls over a repeated, ascending three-chord progression that-- despite the cacophony swarming around it-- projects a remarkable sense of calm. These two titanic tracks-- still staples of the band's live set-- have traditionally overshadowed the rest of Young Team's tracklist; listening to the album in its entirety today, what strikes you most is not so much Mogwai's brute force, but that these erstwhile piss-takers are capable of moments of great beauty and sensitivity: On the glockenspiel-gilded ballad "Tracy", random phone conversations are threaded into the mix, casting the mundane chit-chat in a overwhelmingly melancholic light, rendering the track as a requiem for someone who's no longer with us; on "R U Still In 2 It"-- Young Team's lone vocal track-- guest singer Aidan Moffatt of Arab Strap duets with Braithwaite on a devastating anti-love song that vividly captures a dead-end relationship being strung along by declarations of non-commital commitment.