I have seen the Scottish band Mogwai in concert twice, and each time, their post-rock atmospheric grandiose soundscapes have managed to deeply captivate the audience. However, I would not say the band could be qualified of mainstream. This has changed a bit this summer thanks to a new French horror TV series ‘Les Revenants’ (‘The Returned’, depicting a small mountain town where dead people reappear, apparently looking alive and normal) which used Mogwai’s original music.
The series creator, Fabrice Gobert, considers Mogwai music as the show’s ‘narrator, meaning that it plays a great role in the atmosphere of the story, and I totally see that with Mogwai’s music. As a result, the band has recently seen a new boost in sales, since the soundtrack, originally released in February is being re-promoted to coincide with the finale of the series. Frontman Stuart Braithwaite also noticed that ‘it’s been selling more digitally than physically, which is the complete opposite of our other records and leads me to believe it’s new people [buying it].’
The music was composed before any filming had even started, so Gobert used the music to set the mood for the actors, whereas the band was just given the scripts for the first 2 episodes and some influences such as the famous TV series ‘Twin Peaks’ of my old friend David Lynch.
Braithwaite, who has been watching the series every Sunday night (it’s aired on Channel 4), said they didn’t want to make the music ‘cheesy’. Nevertheless, he finds it creepy despite his involvement with the show: ‘I think that’s testament to how good [the show] is. Normally, when our music comes on something, all I can think of is when we recorded it and that kind of thing, but in this case it transcends that mundane level.’
The whole soundtrack is on YouTube (this is how it works now) and at the first listening, the music sounds subtle, with a lot of these desolated keys, not reaching the heights of layered orchestration that Mogwai is able to achieve, and sounding nothing like this saturated fuzzy white noise heard on their previous album, ‘Hardcore Will Never Die, But You Will’, and not particularly scary for a horror show, but super intense and evocative at times. Guitarist John Cummings told the Quietus, ‘We were aware of trying to keep it not as a typical soundtrack, more just music that doesn’t necessarily do anything that has a bit of presence’…
There is a surprising Washington Phillips’ cover ‘What Are They Doing in Heaven Today’ with the only vocals of the album, and it ends with a more explosive track ‘Wizard Motor’, closer to the powerful fuzz than Mogwai can produce. So new people are discovering (and buying) Mogwai’s music because of a TV show about zombies? What could be better?