Mogwai build these long epic tortured post-rock instrumentals that impregnate you to the bones, and affect you in strange ways by their grandiose melancholy. It is a very atmospheric, weathered and dense sound that you cannot forget once you have witnessed it live.
I saw Mogwai at the Mayan theater in Los Angeles on Tuesday night and was impressed by the space only 5 guys could occupy physically on stage and musically in space: their gigantesque sound rises to the level of a sort of symphony, sometimes flirting with metal, the shoegazing starting to morph into some head banging, menacing and creeping the hell out of you at times, with this wall of guitars successively rising and crashing, or calming you down, or even empowering you, slowly entering each part of your body, with a melody rising above layers and layers of fuzzy guitars. It’s trance music if there is one.
They started their show with the well named track ‘White Noise’, this blinding music that right away installed their grandiosity and transported their audience into another dimension. They played many songs from their fantastically entitled last album ‘Hardcore Will Never Die but You Will’, like ‘Rano Pano’, during which four of them (except the drummer) were playing in a front line, like forming an army of ferocious guitars, an aggressive move they repeated several times during the show, hardly moving, and blasting this circular ascending sound whose vibrations and fuzziness was piercing your body to the core. They also played the majestic and floating-in-ecstasy-melody ‘Death Rays’, the energetic and determined ‘San Pedro', the triumphant and tenacious ‘How To Be A Werewolf’ during which the video of the short film ‘Thirty Century Man’ was projected on the screen behind the stage, opening even more space with this long deserted roads, and the hard-beats-hummed vocals-filled ‘Mexican Grand Prix’.
There were a lot of victories, a lot of these ascending sounds, and a few reaches to another dimension, many ravaging and eardrum destroyer multilayered tunes, but if their metallic symphonies are at the same time very powerful, hair-rising and body-tickling powerful, they are at the same time almost mathematical, abstract and brainy.
But what do you do with a band that writes songs with almost no lyrics? It’s more difficult to identify them, but there is no distraction, and the music alone absorbs you. Also there are the smart titles about some famous musicians ‘I’m Jim Morrison, I’m Dead’, or ‘You’re Lionel Richie’, or the mythological ones ‘How To Be A Werewolf’, or 'Helicon 1’, or the weird political ones ‘George Square Thatcher Death Party’, an upbeat tune for once, with those weird vocals transformed with a vocoder.
It was Stuart Braithwaite’s birthday and since the beginning of the show, some people had shouted some ‘Happy Birthday’, but at one point, the other members of the band, (I think it was John Cummings and Barry Burns) announced it, and it was one of his rare happy interactions, since the rest of the time they were too absorbed building their mighty melancholic tunes. Sure there was no crowd surfing, no real dancing, but it did not mean people were not totally immersed in the music, because they visibly were.
There was an encore with ‘George Square Thatcher Death Party’, and they closed the show with ‘Mogwai Fear Satan’, this long tense and loud part that hypnotizes you for a few minutes with its mid-song close to silence-in suspense moment, before blasting into an inferno of sounds, stabbing you in the heart and making you both blind and deaf, as if you had reached a black hole with no return, the face whipped by the sound waves, the body pressed against a wall.
They left the stage one by one, their guitars still making their distorted noises, but when Barry Burns left the stage, and took his mac under his arm, we know it was really the end.
Setlist
White Noise
Friend of the night
Rano Pano
I’m Jim Morrison, I’m Dead
Death Rays
I know you are but what I am
San Pedro
How To Be A Werewolf
Mexican Grand Prix
Helicon 1
You’re Lionel Richie
Batcat
Encore
George Square Thatcher Death Party
Mogwai Fear Satan