Mogwai’s 11th album commences with an icy electronic arpeggio enveloped in reverb. Beneath, other, deeper, darker synthesiser tones build and glide. The effect is both faintly ominous and cinematic, perhaps because the sound bears a resemblance to the electronic scores that director John Carpenter devised for his movies in the late 70s and early 80s. It’s a suitably grand and portentous opening for The Bad Fire, an album that coincides with Mogwai’s 30th anniversary.
If you’re old enough to remember Mogwai as tracksuit-clad teenage upstarts on the fringes of 90s alt-rock – with their gobby interviews and Blur Are Shite T-shirts, their albums named after gang graffiti and their habit of referring to keyboardist Brendan O’Hare, formerly of Teenage Fanclub, as “the relic” – the notion of them as a stalwart band whose albums now regularly make the Top 10, who command documentaries and autobiographies, feels undeniably odd. But an august institution is what they have become – Britain’s best-loved and longest-serving purveyors of what we might as well call post-rock, despite the band’s aversion to the term.
And so there are things one comes to expect from Mogwai: instrumentals that build from a hushed intimacy to vast, distorted intensity, which duly happens here, most notably on If You Find This World Bad, You Should See Some of the Others. And one also expects fantastic song titles: in addition to the aforementioned, Pale Vegan Hip Pain, Fanzine Made of Flesh and Lion Rumpus are the latest additions to a splendid canon that includes You’re Lionel Richie, It’s What I Want to Do Mum, Simon Ferocious and the peerless Stupid Prick Gets Chased By the Police and Loses His Slut Girlfriend.
If not meaningless exactly, Mogwai’s song titles seldom bear much relation to their actual songs, perhaps to detach the music itself from any preconceptions, and ensure the listener comes to it on their own terms. That said, calling their 11th album The Bad Fire – a vernacular Scottish term for hell – feels telling. It was recorded in a state of personal turmoil, the result of Barry Burns’s daughter suffering a life-threatening illness (she’s since recovered). You could imagine the younger Mogwai channelling such overwhelming emotions into fraught, annihilating noise, but instead The Bad Fire’s mood feels measured and composed, leaning more on melody than dynamics.
There are certainly moments when the sound swells to all-the-effects-pedals-at-once crescendos, but in context, they seem more like exhalations rather than cathartic screams: Hi Chaos is underpinned by a gently rolling rhythm that pulls its finale back from the brink. Elsewhere on If You Find …, an exquisitely mournful guitar figure hangs suspended in echoing space over an unhurried rhythm, bearing a passing resemblance to pre-Dark Side of the Moon Pink Floyd, a comparison you suspect would have been taken very badly indeed by tracksuit-era Mogwai, but is intended in an entirely complimentary way. That kind of beauty abounds: Pale Vegan Hip Pain is a thing of stately loveliness; 18 Volcanoes has the woozy, cosseting quality of My Bloody Valentine at their dreamiest. And there’s a certain skewed poppiness: with its vocodered vocals, bright analogue synths and blurs of frantically strummed guitar, Fanzine Made of Flesh conjures up the peculiar but appealing impression of Moon Safari-era Air if they had been as interested in Sonic Youth as Serge Gainsbourg. Lion Rumpus seems to have been recorded with everything in the red, complete with a fabulously in-your-face guitar solo, but its tone is strangely breezy.
The overall effect is elating rather than confrontational. Fact Boy ends the album with two minutes of vapour-trail noise, but the music that precedes its spectral conclusion is brightly hued, with a joyous, pealing quality. Perhaps this tells you something about a certain maturity that comes when your career reaches its 30th anniversary: you’re more inclined to be considered in your approach. Or perhaps it says something about viewing music as a kind of sanctuary – a refuge rather than a rage room. Either way, it’s not an approach that will please everyone. There’s a vocal subsection of Mogwai fandom that views their first two albums as their inarguable peak, for whom the music on The Bad Fire will doubtless represent another disappointment, the AOR version of what they once were. But for those less inclined to kvetching, The Bad Fire is a rich, enveloping delight, a profoundly grim situation turned into music that’s graceful, striking and even optimistic.
This week Alexis listened to
Moonchild Sannelly – Big Booty
The South African singer’s third album is a joy: something about its unpredictability, its chaotic melding of styles – electro, kwaito, hip-hop, house, gqom – recalls prime-time OutKast, at least in spirit.
• The Bad Fire is released on 24 January
