Continue the love with Mogwai’s new release
After 25 years of being Scotland’s post-punk pioneers, no-one was more surprised than Mogwai when their new album went to No 1 in the United Kingdom. It was just never on their radar.
As The Love Continues is gorgeous, uplifting and all-encompassing, but it doesn’t seem any more commercial than any of their nine other records.
So how come? Now that streaming is the dominant method of transmission, actual sales of albums are given a significantly higher weighting than a casual stream.
So a small, but fiercely loyal fanbase such as Mogwai command can make a big impact, if they all act at the same time. Which they did.
High-profile fans including actor Elijah Wood and Robert Smith from The Cure all encouraged their followers to buy the
record and mobilised minor masses. It even went Top 10 in America, another thing the band were neither looking for nor expecting.
To The Bin My Friend, Tonight We Vacate Earth is a suitably epic way to begin. Use it to rinse off any lingering odour of existential doom. The band are largely instrumental, so it’s the synth that carries the melody on this slow, fuzzy hymn to humanity and it’s your heart that bursts from your chest with expansive joy.
When Mogwai began in the mid-90s, it was Sonic Youth, Fugazi and My Bloody Valentine who were their strongest influences, so there’s a strong shoegaze streak and a fondness for almost everpresent
guitar feedback.
Their sweeping, cinematic aesthetic has led to soundtracking several films and TV shows over the years (New Neon drama ZeroZeroZero and the football documentary Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait are particularly good) and those sensibilities serve them well again here.
The strings on Midnight Flit, set against cascading drum fills, tell a story on their own, conducting their climax straight to your soul.
Another group of old white fellas who have been making guitar music for a very long time are Melvins.
Formed in the early-80s by Buzz Osborne and Dale Crover, they may have inadvertently started grunge. Back in 1988, Crover played drums on an early Nirvana recording and Osborne would later introduce Kurt Cobain to Krist Novoselic and Dave Grohl.
Melvins were one of the few bands Cobain openly cited as an influence, and he even tried out to be in the band, once upon a time. They might have missed a trick there.
At the start, they were all about hard, fast punk and while they are prolific, potent and unpredictable, no-one would have guessed their new album would begin with a Beach Boys parody. Working with God gets aurally heavy, but is also a lot of fun. Quite a few song titles are not fit for print here, but make for a carefree, riotous ride.
While we’re on the topic of guitar bands, it would be remiss not to mention King Gizzard and The Lizard Wizard. The Western Australian mystical maestros are also prolific and diverse (they released five albums in 2017 alone) and even the global pandemic hasn’t slowed their momentum.
The term psychedelic isn’t quite sufficient and experimental seems to understate matters here. They’re ridiculously proficient musicians and seem to stay interested by incorporating challenging technical and artistic concepts into their work.
The second-half of their latest double album L.W. (the first-half K.G. came out last year) feels like a culmination of a lot of their work over the past decade, making it a pretty good entry point to this bizarre, brilliant band.