Review for www.nomoreworkhorse.com
Showing posts with label Stuart Braithwaite. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Stuart Braithwaite. Show all posts
Monday, July 28, 2025
Wednesday, July 10, 2024
Monday, April 24, 2023
Wednesday, November 9, 2022
Tuesday, September 27, 2022
Sunday, September 3, 2017
Saturday, February 25, 2017
Monday, February 20, 2017
Wednesday, June 8, 2016
Tuesday, January 21, 2014
Wednesday, March 6, 2013
Thursday, April 5, 2012
Album Review: Mogwai – Come On Die Young
Mogwai’s second album Come On Die Young came out in 1999, and it’s
one of their mellowest of all, with very little guitar crunch. It’s an intensely subtle listen, right from
the foreboding opener Punk Rock: - featuring a sample of an Iggy Pop interview
over some spooky music. Much of the
album is very tranquil and moody. Cody
features Stuart Braithwaite on weedy vocals, while many of the tracks sort of
run into each other, the depressed-sounding Helps Both Ways has some very pleasant woodwind.
Waltz for Aidan (presumably Moffat) has a gorgeous melody, while May
Nothing But Happiness Come Through Your Door patents slow and brooding in the
instrumental, ‘post-rock’ sense. After
the brief keyboard piece Oh! How the Dogs Stack Up, things get a bit livelier
with Ex-Cowboy. The track starts off
sounding like The Cure’s Disintegration on downers before swelling to noisier
territory. In fact, this track, the in
turns pensive and noisy Chocky and Christmas Steps occupy almost half an hour
of the album. The latter track is a
slightly different version to the one on the No Education = No Future EP, but
it’s none the less thrilling for that with its massive noise pay-offs.
Final track, the brief Punk Rock/Puff Daddy/Antichrist is a slight
anticlimax, with forlorn brass making it almost like an afterthought. It’s an odd album really. An album like this is not really about the
individual songs, more about painting a mood and the mood here is grey and
bleak.
Thursday, February 17, 2011
Concert Review: Mogwai – Olympia, Dublin, 15th February 2011
What better to do on a dark February evening than go see one of Scotland’s finest bands play a packed-out Olympia. Mogwai attract a loyal following, and the venue filled early.
RM Hubbert was the support, and was an unexpected delight with his pleasantly aimless Spanish-inflected instrumental folk, and equally pleasantly aimless rambling stories between songs. His acoustic pyrotechnics were something to behold, his guitar doubling up as percussion instrument, with touches of Rodrigo y Gabriela and Mark Kozelek. Unfortunately his music seemed like it was interrupting the conversations within the crowd.
Mogwai have been going for the best part of 15 years, and by the time they came on stage there was swaying room only. Kicking off with 2 tracks from new album Hardcore Will Never Die… But You Will, the gentle White Noise and Rano Pano, it became clear that this is a band whose stagecraft is at an all-time low. Most of the band bar Stuart Braithwaite remained rigid throughout the show. However what’s also clear is that they are at the top of their game musically.
Friend of the Night was an early highlight, the keyboard motif well accompanied by powerful guitars. Less a gig and more of a religious experience, Mogwai Fear Satan had the crowd in raptures and terror in equal measures, as ominous silence was replaced by deafening noise.
The newer tracks fitted well with old favourites, San Pedro thrilled with its breakneck pace and powerhouse guitars, while How To Be A Werewolf and Helicon 1 provided hallucinatory bliss. You’re Lionel Richie and Batcat upped the ante to almost metal levels, a bit like the musical equivalent of King Kong as the audience feasted on heavy riffs.
Mogwai did well to maintain the intensity levels throughout, and if anything the encore was even louder. Interestingly they were brave enough to finish with one of their least representative songs, the electro-pulsing Mexican Grand Prix.
Powerful, overwhelming stuff. Any doubts I might have had were beaten into submission by the onslaught. Earplugs remained in pocket… just about. The feeling was akin to having had a really good scare at a horror movie. Heart almost in mouth, giddy, and seriously impressed. Killian fears Mogwai?!
Monday, October 18, 2010
Album Review: Mogwai – Special Moves
This is Mogwai’s first live album, a recording of a gig in Brooklyn last year. It’s a very lavish package, with a live album, the Burning live DVD, and also downloads of additional material.
There’s a spread of material here from all their albums. The quality of the recording is very good, you can hear every scrape of guitar string even amidst the inevitable onslaught that comes in many of their songs. If anything, some of the tracks are even more embellished, I’m Jim Morrison, I’m Dead in particular benefits from additional keyboards. Later, Hunted By A Freak emerges as one of the strongest of the bunch. The roar of appreciation when its off kilter guitar picking starts up is quite something to behold for an instrumental!
The track Cody contains some slightly thin vocals from Stuart Braithwaite and is a little jarring. The other tracks draw from all Mogwai’s repertoire of talent, the slow-builders (Friend of the Night, I Love You, I’m Going To Blow Up Your School), the elephant-on-the-loose (Glasgow Megasnake), and the epic mindblower (Like Herod). For this last one especially it’s well worth watching the ‘Burning’ DVD (tastefully shot by Vincent Moon). When the sudden guitar assault comes mid-song the camera is on the crowd. You can feel their exhilaration as they simply scream and roar with a combination of fear and elation, which sums up Mogwai’s live experience.
Wednesday, August 11, 2010
Album Review: Mogwai – Mr. Beast
Writing about Mogwai rarely does justice to the music contained within. Or maybe it’s my chronic inability to write about (mostly) instrumental music. Either way 2006 saw the first Mogwai album for 3 years, which starts gingerly with Auto-Rock, entering on a piano sequence which builds, adding drums into a crescendo. It would be the perfect ‘walk-on stage’ music for the band. The album then bursts forward with the explosive Glasgow Mega-Snake, which is pretty much like Mogwai gone heavy metal.
Acid Food features electronic beats and steel guitar, and Stuart Braithwaite’s vocoderized vocals. These elements should clash horribly but coalesce to produce a decent track, reminiscent of some of the tracks on Rock Action.
What’s noticeable about this album is that the tracks are shorter, and more concise, none of running longer than 5 and a half minutes, and most of them less than 4. This is not necessarily what you want from Mogwai, as one of their main strengths is their command of pacing and dynamics, in allowing a piece of music to carefully unfurl and evolve into something.
Case in point is the track Travel Is Dangerous, which has the raw materials required to be an absolute epic, containing the classic Mogwai build up to heavy guitars, though it all happens rather quickly and the track ends in just 4 minutes.
After the piano-led Team Handed, also 4 minutes but conversely, doesn’t really need to be, we get Emergency Trap which pleasingly is 5 and a half minutes, with a nice build up and some stately piano parts with the help of some distorted guitars and heavy drums (hooray!). It’s the track Travel Is Dangerous should have been.
Emergency Trap has a blessed-out atmosphere and drifts along serenely, but this is shattered by Folk Death 95 which pounds along most pleasingly in a classic Mogwai vein with some very metallish guitars. This track also benefits form a proper build up as we are led into metal mayhem gradually, rather than dumped straight into it. I’d still like a longer version of this one though, as the heaviness ebbs away almost as soon as it starts. No Mogwai track should be only 3 and a half minutes long!
I Chose Horses features Tetsuya Fukagawa from a Japanese hardcore band Envy reciting Japanese over a keyboard arrangement by composer Craig Armstrong but the overall effect leaves me a little nonplussed. However final track We’re No Here is a nice heavy blast to end the album.
It’s a very solid album, for sure, but I wouldn’t have complained if many of the songs were a lot longer. However the shorter nature of the songs might act as a handy starting point for those looking to discover this band. And, let’s face it, who needs Sigur Ros, with these guys around?
Acid Food features electronic beats and steel guitar, and Stuart Braithwaite’s vocoderized vocals. These elements should clash horribly but coalesce to produce a decent track, reminiscent of some of the tracks on Rock Action.
What’s noticeable about this album is that the tracks are shorter, and more concise, none of running longer than 5 and a half minutes, and most of them less than 4. This is not necessarily what you want from Mogwai, as one of their main strengths is their command of pacing and dynamics, in allowing a piece of music to carefully unfurl and evolve into something.
Case in point is the track Travel Is Dangerous, which has the raw materials required to be an absolute epic, containing the classic Mogwai build up to heavy guitars, though it all happens rather quickly and the track ends in just 4 minutes.
After the piano-led Team Handed, also 4 minutes but conversely, doesn’t really need to be, we get Emergency Trap which pleasingly is 5 and a half minutes, with a nice build up and some stately piano parts with the help of some distorted guitars and heavy drums (hooray!). It’s the track Travel Is Dangerous should have been.
Emergency Trap has a blessed-out atmosphere and drifts along serenely, but this is shattered by Folk Death 95 which pounds along most pleasingly in a classic Mogwai vein with some very metallish guitars. This track also benefits form a proper build up as we are led into metal mayhem gradually, rather than dumped straight into it. I’d still like a longer version of this one though, as the heaviness ebbs away almost as soon as it starts. No Mogwai track should be only 3 and a half minutes long!
I Chose Horses features Tetsuya Fukagawa from a Japanese hardcore band Envy reciting Japanese over a keyboard arrangement by composer Craig Armstrong but the overall effect leaves me a little nonplussed. However final track We’re No Here is a nice heavy blast to end the album.
It’s a very solid album, for sure, but I wouldn’t have complained if many of the songs were a lot longer. However the shorter nature of the songs might act as a handy starting point for those looking to discover this band. And, let’s face it, who needs Sigur Ros, with these guys around?
Tuesday, February 9, 2010
Album Review: Mogwai – Rock Action
This is probably one of Mogwai’s more accessible albums, as it’s less noisy and heavy than their previous albums. Released in 2001, it begins with the slightly scratchy Sine Wave before going into the epic Take Me Somewhere Nice. This song incorporates keyboards into Mogwai’s bass-heavy sound. It features vocals by David Pajo (Slint/Papa M) which work well with some beautiful music played by Stuart Braithwaite and co. I can almost feel the snow fall.
After the short interlude, O I Sleep we get another brooding song, Dial: Revenge which hangs on a simple sounding acoustic guitar figure before the keyboards come in. It features vocals sung in Welsh by Gruff Rhys of Super Furry Animals. You Don’t Know Jesus runs to 8 minutes and is more abrasive sounding. The band, who are pretty restrained elsewhere on this album, let loose with heavy guitars and crashing cymbals. Two Rights Make One Wrong is the longest song here at nine and a half minutes, starting out with jangly guitar but building up with guitars, strident drums, keyboards, electronics, wordless vocals before finishing off with banjo. It shouldn’t work but surprisingly it does. The final track Secret Pint is a little anti-climactic, a sparser, piano-led track with more gentle vocals.
A good entry point for checking out this band’s guitar-effect heavy post-rock.
After the short interlude, O I Sleep we get another brooding song, Dial: Revenge which hangs on a simple sounding acoustic guitar figure before the keyboards come in. It features vocals sung in Welsh by Gruff Rhys of Super Furry Animals. You Don’t Know Jesus runs to 8 minutes and is more abrasive sounding. The band, who are pretty restrained elsewhere on this album, let loose with heavy guitars and crashing cymbals. Two Rights Make One Wrong is the longest song here at nine and a half minutes, starting out with jangly guitar but building up with guitars, strident drums, keyboards, electronics, wordless vocals before finishing off with banjo. It shouldn’t work but surprisingly it does. The final track Secret Pint is a little anti-climactic, a sparser, piano-led track with more gentle vocals.
A good entry point for checking out this band’s guitar-effect heavy post-rock.
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