Bleep

No other band exhibits dynamic range so extremely and expressively as Mogwai, founded in Glasgow 1995 by schoolfriends Stuart Braithwaite, Dominic Aitchinson, and Martin Bulloch, and joined along the way by John Cummings, Brendan O'Hare, and Barry Burns. Their propensity for striking awe at all volumes with wide, largely instrumental paletes has made them a vital lifeforce in the British music scene, and the circuits of post rock, noise rock, and art rock worldwide.

Mogwai’s 1997 opus Mogwai Young Team saw them break onto the scene with the energy of freewheeling debutantes to exhilarate post rock’s ethereal, tremolo soaked textures. Over an hour’s worth of jetéing guitar harmonics and deft drums whip up contemplative frenzies, coalescing in the absolutely monolithic ‘Like Herod’ as thorny snaggles of guitar smooth out then scrunch back up, go whisper quiet then wail at jet engine levels of epic contrast.

Recorded in rural Cassadaga, NY, 1999’s Come On Die Young set the benchmark for Mogwai’s later output, charging arrestingly into minimalism without sacrificing the band’s theatrics. Revered for its newly poignant offerings of sullen, restrained instrumentals, the album pits slackened lap steel twangs and headhung, downtrodden lyrics against agitated piercing shreds, and tracks that accelerate like rolling boulders into heavily charged frissons of guitars and drums. Prefaced with a chilling monologue sampled from Iggy Pop, CODY finds Mogwai finetuning their versatility in moods both meditative and emphatic.

Perhaps the most pivotal of their initial trilogy is 2001's Rock Action, seriously expanding the gamut of their already vast soundstage: Mogwai utilised synths for the first time, only adding to the dense arrays of joyful noise and heaving distortion offset by twinkling glockenspiel. Rock Action amasses overwhelming textural singularities with deathdefying guitars and blizzards of cymbals, yet still hits that deeply emotive, intense universal feel, evidenced by the bittersweet strings smooth gliding guitars, and sweet crisp glitches of runaway hit ‘Take Me Somewhere Nice’.

With three decades of passionately rocking and rolling, Mogwai's first three albums remain some of the most entrancing to grace the shelves.