In summary of the first section that follows, a mistake was made, a beautiful mistake (to use a cliché that isn’t used nearly enough).
Mogwai’s new album, Rave Tapes, was heard, about a month
before its actual release, around Christmas ‘13. To be fair, it wasn’t the
result of some devious search of the deepweb – the leak was an accidental
discovery following which a lack of will power kicked in. Rave Tapes was heard
and reheard and reheard on repeat for the next 25 days; it was absorbed and
internalized to a great degree. See, Mogwai, by virtue of its music and all the
peripheral Scot humour and mystery and everything else, is a band that Means
Something – with the appropriate capitalization, as reviewers, particularly the
Pitchfork guys, have been so wont to point out in the past fifteen years, ever
since Young Team first came out and confused listeners. So yes, the music of
Rave Tapes does Mean Something to this writer, Something so significant that
all surface layers of irony and facetiousness and self-importance are peeled
off to reveal a deep, personal connect with a piece of art. It’s a connect that
I and Only I share with the music – sure, the simmering tension of Heard About
You Last Night is for everyone to consume, but not in quite the same way as I
would (and vice-versa as applicable).
Cut to present day, where most of the reviews for
Rave Tapes are out. Starting with Pitchfork and one Nick Neyland, who says:
“Rave Tapes is the work of an oddly conservative band, turning away from the
openness they once embraced.” Fuck you, Nick Neyland, and fuck you, Pitchfork.*
Then, as I trawl the internet for further reviews, I realize that my
well-formulated thoughts on Rave Tapes were in great contrast to the rest of
the reviews on the internet too. Writers liked, disliked, hated, remained on
the fence about the album, depending on personal taste and deadlines, but
essentially, almost all of them agreed that this wasn’t that great a step
forward for a band of Mogwai’s stature, that they’d played it safe (once more) and
done more of the same and then some. That the tricks are getting old, the jokes
write themselves, the dry humour is predictable, dated. Forget how different
Rave Tapes sounds when placed against Hardcore Will Never Die But You Will,
Earth Division EP, or Les Revenants, their past three releases because that’s
going against the party line (or those three albums were anomalies and this is
status quo). Fuck them all.
*
Nick Heyland is a quite fantastic writer; even the Rave Tapes review, if looked
at purely from a point of view of aesthetics and turn of phrase and language,
is brilliant. Pitchfork, leaving aside their ridiculous taste in music (leaving
aside their love, traditionally, for people like Godspeed You! Black Emperor or
William Basinski or old Mogwai or Radiohead and so forth), is by far my
favourite music publication. The pristine writing, the insightful analysis on
every single review, the level of research conducted for even the smallest commission,
Mark Richardson, their stature as Pitchfork, I love it all. But fuck Pitchfork.
Coming back to reality and the matter that’s being
tackled here, I do agree – very, very begrudgingly – at some of the criticisms
directed at Rave Tapes. Actually, I don’t agree with the criticism at all; what
I’m trying to say is that I can somewhat understand the thought behind it –
I’ve accused bands of repeating themselves plenty of times in the past and not
moving forward musically – the cop-outs, if you will, who stumble upon a
musical formula, repeat it ad infinitum, rake in the big bucks (or not), and
disintegrate or slowly fade. So it’s only fair that that would come back to
bite me in the ass.
But Mogwai is not your regular garden-variety band.
It’s the kind of band that provokes deep, often extreme, reactions in people,
the way that, you know, bands like Radiohead or Tool or Nine Inch Nails or Deftones
or Miles Davis or Burial or Meshuggah or Pantera or Slayer or extreme metal
bands or John Cage or Sonic Youth or Rihanna would. They fall into that
category of musicians who just Know So Much More Than The Average Human Being.
By ‘knowing more’, I don’t mean instrumental proficiency or an understanding of
music theory or knowledge of current affairs or intellectual supremacy in
matters of theology or political analysis or a degree in bio-engineering or
intricate surgical chops.
Nope. They just have an understanding of that
elusive Something Greater. It’s meaningful beyond this writer’s comprehension,
and it manifests itself through the music. Like when Remurdered shifts focus
and treads into a bouncing, dancing synth sequence, there’s still that ominous
feeling that something’s got to give. It has to. And it does, as the drums
collude with the wailing tones in the back. Or when the melodic guitar
interplay reaches grandiose proportions such that it becomes overwhelming to
listen and easier to shut off but impossible to shut off at the same time.
Sure, it’s Mogwai doing what they know best, but they do it better than most.
And while most other bands are not allowed to retreat as easily as Mogwai do in
the transition from the red herring of Remurdered into Hexon Bogon, Mogwai are
allowed. Because of that whole some people are more equal than other people
thing, if I may get a little Dostoyevskian about it. And then there’s Repelish,
once more reeking of the trademark Mogwai humour and their creepy obsession
with Satan. Sure, it’s poking fun at the so-called subliminal message about
Satan on Led Zep’s Stairway to Heaven – as an aside, the song is a recreation
of a recording from a ’70s Christian Rock Radio where the anchor is utterly
shocked and very angry at how these rock musicians are obsessed with the devil:
Gotta live for Satan, Master Satan;
the band wanted to use the original recording but they couldn’t identify the
owners of the recording so they got a friend to re-recite the radio broadcast
and chopped it up and placed it alongside the music; this is not first-hand
information but I don’t have the source where I read the info originally to
cite here and if this weren’t a blog post then this non-citing of sources would
probably be called out as not ideal and some stickler for convention might even
toss the old plagiarism word around – but there’s so much more to it than that.
It’s an old trick to laugh at people’s shock about
the mythical singing in reverse on STH. But the point here isn’t to laugh at
that and just that itself. The point, at least the point that’s been
interpreted by the writer of this rambling blog post, is the unease, the
absolutely chilling tension of the music, and how it works perfectly in sync
with the surprise in the tone of the narrator. Ignoring the content of the
spoken words in the song for a second, the complete shock and exasperation and earnest alarm and amazement that the speaker professes, interspersed with the
fluttering on-off dynamics of the song add a degree of ominous fear and
trepidation, a degree lower than the kind of fear you experience when you hear
a loud noise inside your home post-midnight. The humour of the piece comes
across as a secondary gain, not the primary one – as in, you experience the
important emotions of the song first, and then you also laugh at how
flabbergasted the guy speaking seems to be.
Also, there has to be an overarching meaning to the
song names, especially as we have a song called The Lord is Out of Control,
coming close on the heels of This Messiah Needs Watching, which was one of the
many standout tracks on last year’s Les Revenants soundtrack.
--
Moving on, the plodding snyth lines that appear
often here, especially the slow, deviant lines as on Heard About You Last Night
and the seventh song, which song’s name I can’t remember right now, showcase a
Les Revenants hangover in the best way possible. Les Revenants was a landmark
release (sort of) for Mogwai, exploring such unpleasant and yet such endearing
spaces musically, so the new approach that was employed on last year’s release
does find its way here, as does the token Stuart Braithwaite-sung number about
train lines going nowhere (or trained mice, I can’t say for sure), and while
old motifs that Mogwai have used – and possibly patented, only for God is an
Astronaut, Explosions in the Sky, Sigur Ros, and many others to dilute that
original dynamic, but I digress – in the past (vocodered singing on the album
closer) do appear here sporadically (or often, if you read all the other
reviews online), but there’s a lot of lateral progression, evolution versus
revolution, and a cultivation and a very careful nurturing of a sound
handcrafted by the Mogwai guys over like 15 years and more. And what a fantastic name for an album Rave Tapes is.
Rating: 9/10
