Bleep

A highlight in what was a most fruitful year in music, Mogwai’s 1997 opus Mogwai Young Team saw the band break onto the scene in peak form. With the title fashioned after Glaswegian gang names, the album brings the energy of freewheeling debutantes to exhilarate post rock’s ethereal textures, guided by Chemikal Underground labelhead and The Delgado’s drummer Paul Savage. Originally recorded at the label’s house studio Chem19, the album’s recording sessions were by Mogwai’s recollection “turbulent, disorganised and hastily mixed”, perhaps the impetus behind some of the most crushing riffs the Glaswegian unit has ever laid to tape.

Opening with an ominous yet reverent reading of a review describing the band’s gigs as “putting a human being in a trancelike state”, Mogwai Young Team makes good on that promise with over an hour’s worth of jetéing guitar harmonics and deft drums whipping up contemplative frenzies. For many, the album coalesces in the absolutely monolithic ‘Like Herod’, a murkier, lurkier cut with thorny snaggles of guitar smoothing out and scrunching back up, going whisper quiet then wailing at jet engine levels of epic contrast. There’s a wonderful wildness to its gnarled shreds subsiding in kettle boiling whistles and pulsing black waves, emblematic of each track’s propensity for striking awe at all volumes.

Intersticed with buoying piano performances overtaken by wind turbine, engine revving noise, the tracklist explores the high and low altitudes in equal measure. The dewdrop glockenspiels of ‘Tracy’ merge melodies with frayed guitars, leading to cheeky prank calls emulating internal band strife engulfed in droning textures. ‘R U Still In 2 It?’ carefully treads a relationship’s fading embers with speaksung vocals and tremolo soaked guitars, before the pure energy release of ‘Mogwai Fear Satan’, capitalising on the album’s trance with flute and stomping drums diving headfirst into the passionate rampage of ceaselessly tumbling rhythms.

Mogwai’s debut full length would set them on a trajectory to a #1 album in 2021, and ignite three decades of sonic firepower.