 |
Mogwai - Happy Songs for Happy People So - Mogwai. Are they any good?
I must admit to having had a love/hate relationship with the band ever since I became aware of them when ‘Ten Rapid’ was released. I heard the songs and thought ‘anybody can make this music, but all credit to this band seeing as nobody else actually is making this music’. Then I saw them live and was pummelled into ecstatic submission by their white-hot, white-noise, slow riot, quiet/loud genius. And then I bought ‘Young Team’ and thought it was appalling.
A couple of years later I listened to ‘Come on Die Young’. I found it mildly diverting and profoundly dismal, until two tracks at the end of the album (‘Chocky’ and ‘Christmas Steps’) actually moved me (to tears and tennis racket/mirror rock-posturing respectively). My most recent Mogwai experience was buying ‘Rock Action’, thinking it was quite good (and quite short) and then not being able to remember anything about it, except that the song with the bloke from the Super Furry Animals was rather nice.
We have established that I quite like Mogwai, that I recognise they are capable of moments of greatness, and yet I often struggle to see what makes their work anything other than miserable elevator music. ‘Quite liking’ Mogwai damns them with faint praise – so is ‘Happy Songs for Happy People’ worth a little more?
First track ‘Hunted by a Freak’ is undeniably great. Its ethereal sounds are reminiscent of the first Lush album (and similar early 90s female-fronted [cough] shoe-gazing), where you know they’re singing but can’t work out the words. The song expands into the chorus and then somehow it gets bigger. Then is gets bigger again. Then is gets bigger still until finally you’re carried away. I don’t know how they do it, and the fact that they do it without using the heavy-duty distortion pedals of yesteryear proves Mogwai’s progression. While some of their earlier work is analogous to a mushroom cloud, ‘Hunted by a Freak’ sounds more like an avalanche. Closing track ‘Stop Coming To My House’ also manages to build, build and build some more until you can hardly take the weight.
Track six (‘Ratts of the Capital’) starts softly, brings in the xylophone, calms down, comes back, brings in the xylophone again and then KICKS YOU IN THE ASS FOR ABOUT TWO MINUTES and then it calms down again. It’s great.
While they were once the muscular (yet unsubtle) punks of post-rock, Mogwai are now artisans on a par with (for example) Labradford – as evidenced by ‘I Know You Are But What Am I?’ which emerges crystalline & bright from a solitary, mournful piano riff.
Much of the album makes me think of Radiohead. Try not to scoff at my apparently limited frame of reference – I’ll explain. Both bands attempt to make forward-thinking rock music while the rest of the world is caught up in the latest market-led retro messiahs. Both bands use both ‘traditional’ and ‘modern’ tools and hope to God that they don’t end up sounding like Jesus Jones. Quite simply, and to their credit, Mogwai manage to instil more humanity into ‘Happy Songs…’ than Radiohead did in ‘Hail to the Thief’. It may well be ‘kept awake in a filthy bedsit by police sirens at three in the morning feeling dirty from too much coffee and cigarettes and I’ve been eating fifty-fifty porridge and little else so the orange glow from the streetlight outside my broken window is making me look healthier than I actually am though I just listened to ‘Kids Will Be Skeletons’ so there’s still hope’ humanity, but it’s humanity nonetheless. It might have something to do with the plaintive cello that is especially prominent in ‘Moses? I amn’t’. It might have something to do with the steady, inexorable pace of the songs. It might just be because Mogwai so obviously create their songs as a band.
There’s no revolution here. What we have instead is a noticeable evolution, an album without fillers (9 tracks, just over 40 minutes) and an emotional roller-coaster ride. Having said that, I can’t guess at the longevity of ‘Happy Songs…’, so in six month’s time it’ll either be credited as one of the albums of the year or be relegated to being the elevator music of choice in the department store of woe.
|
