Mogwai HHV Records 12 Items
Every Country's Sun takes two decades of Mogwai's signature, contrasting sounds – towering intensity, pastoral introspection, synth-rock minimalism, DNA-detonating volume – and distills it, beautifully, into 56 concise minutes of gracious elegance, hymnal trance-rock, and transcendental euphoria. Produced by psych-rock luminary Dave Fridmann, it's a structural soundscape built from stark foundations up; from a gentle, twinkling, synth-rock spectre to a solid, blown-out, skyward-thrusting obelisk. There's percussive, dream-state electronics (“Coolverine”), church organs as chariots of existential fire (“Brain Sweeties”), tremulous, foreboding bleeping – possibly from a dying android (“aka 47”). Their most transportive album yet, it also hosts their most fully realized art-pop sing-along of their storied history, “Party In The Dark,” a head-spinning disco-dream double-helix echoing New Order and The Flaming Lips, featuring Braithwaite's seldom-heard melodic vocals declaring he's “directionless and innocent, searching for another piece of mind”. This is music as a keep-out chrysalis, protective audio armor through exalting organs and portentous, dissonant guitar fuzz warping at the edges, bending the world inside-out into a reality in which you'd much rather live. The last three songs ascend into explosive exorcism, closing with the colossal “Every Country's Sun,” its searching intensity whooshing towards infinity in a dazzling cosmic crescendo.
An (almost) wordless band
Mogwai, which means demon in Cantonese, was really just a placeholder as an initial name for the four-piece band from Scotland. “We always intended on getting a better one, but like a lot of other things we never got round to it,” said guitarist Stuart Braithwaite. The four probably didn’t expect that the instrumental act Mogwai, not to be confused with the German DJ Moguai, would develop into a significantly influential band for post-rock with an international fan base when they formed in the mid-90s. After their first live shows, they recorded their debut Mogwai Young Team in 1997, which already showcased their potential in Pink Floyd-esque sprawling progressive tracks and sent them on tour. The wordless band with musical borrowings from Sonic Youth and The Cure often speaks out off stage, however, clearly political: after the Scottish government imposed a general curfew for young people, the band revolted and also immediately gave their next EP the title No Education = No Future (Fuck the Curfew). With producer Dave Fridmann on board, now known for his work with the Flaming Lips, MGMT and Tame Impala, Mogwai recorded their comparatively minimalist vinyl Come On Die Young in 1999, and with Rock Action, on which they weaved synthesizer sounds into their sound collages for the first time, the band experienced their greatest commercial success to date.
More than serious guitar music
Mogwai aren’t afraid of wide-ranging suspense: their EP My Father, My King consists of a single 20-minute instrumental piece. On Happy Songs for Happy People in 2003, the band dove back into synthesizer seas and sailed into new sound realms on string and piano arrangements – the “serious guitar music”, as Mogwai defined their musical goal at the beginning, expanded to include far more than guitars, for the purpose of artistic experimentation. In doing so, the band tells mostly dark and melancholic stories purely through their instruments, which would also be hard to express in words. For the French documentary Zidane and the American drama The Fountain Mogwai were commissioned for the first time with soundtracks and made a name for themselves worldwide in the cinema – it should not remain with the two films over the years. Later they created the music for the French series Les Revenants, as well as for the sci-fi flick Kin and the crime show ZeroZeroZero. They then entered the British Top 40 in 2006 with the single Friend of the Night, and their album Mr. Beast was eventually awarded the Golden Record. Cross-media collaborations continued to be their thing: on the Batcat EP, Mogwai can be heard together with rock’n’roll legend Roky Erickson, and in 2010 director Vincent Moon documented the band’s live efforts in a concert film – the music for which was released as Special Moves on their own label. For their releases in North America, they finally joined Sub Pop: the label that has already spawned Nirvana and Soundgarden.
A youthful appetite for novelty
Inspired by Krautrock, Rave Tapes shifted the use of instruments predominantly into the electronic realm, creating dystopian atmospheres like you’d hear in a sci-fi thriller. Mogwai also continued to have their songs remixed: the 2014 EP Music Industry 3. Fitness Industry 1. featured new versions of their earlier tracks, as well as previously on the albums Kicking a Dead Pig and A Wrenched Virile Lore. In 2015, founding member John Cummings left the band, but that hardly stopped the rest of the group from working tirelessly on new projects: already in 2017, the vinyl Every Country’s Sun was released, reuniting Mogwai with producer David Fridmann. Here, the band, with a 20-year career behind them, defiantly created another musical reinvention: with giant-sounding drums, overdriving guitars and a youthful appetite for novelty. On their first number one record, As The Love Continues, the band continued this trend: creating an otherworldly atmosphere and gripping its listeners as if they were united with Mogwai.