Mogwai are shite. It’s factual and if there are any legal problems about it I’ll go to court as someone that has studied shite so I can prove shite is Mogwai. Mogwai are so fucking pish.
Happy Songs for Happy People is instrumental rock, yes. I don’t disagree with the gorgeous melodies or the cataclysmic atmospherics. But I ask: where’s the rock? Where’s the destruction? Sort of like Herod, that king who was sometimes quiet, but sometimes went fucking nuts. Where’s that?
Here’s my take: instead of recording the record forward with the instruments played backwards (which wasn’t done), I would have recorded it forward, but mixed it backwards, but not exactly backwards as in taking the front and making it the end and taking the end and making it the front (with everything reversed in between). Maybe more like sideways where you take the tracks on the record and turn it ninety degrees in three-dimensions so that it’s facing you end-to-end. Mix it like that. The record would be less than a second. But what a sonic flush of epic proportions. That would fucking slay.
But Mogwai isn’t post-rock: Mogwai does whatever it wants. Mogwai rocks action. Mogwai hid my mother from the Nazis. Mogwai played foosball with me when I was lonely. Mogwai saved my life. I owe a lot to Mogwai.
Archived article by Walter Chen