LOOK, I love Mogwai. Young Team is one of the best debut albums in recent rock history, not to mention one of the most influential. Plus, as leading lights of Glasgow’s music mafia, they helped spearhead a Scots music scene so vibrant, that I fondly imagine the A1 is even now clogged with a pilgrimage of despairing and envious Camdenites fleeing London’s creative desert (Aereogramme vs The Libertines? Genius vs naff pub rock).
However, all is not well. I’ve always repressed a vague suspicion that Mogwai have been treading water on subsequent albums, having invented a stunning formula but not had the courage or the inspiration to leave it behind once they realised they’d never write another Like Herod.
Tonight sadly confirms it, worse, there is a damning, fatal whiff of smugness about Mogwai.
It starts with support act Kling Klang, who sound like a GCSE keyboard group playing seventies prog hits - or that episode of The Simpsons when Bart slips the Iron Butterfly sheet music to the church organist. Someone somewhere thinks all this is frightfully clever and ironic. It follows with what seems like 40 minutes of ambient noises before Mogwai come on.
Of course they’re good. In fact on the surface, they’re awesome. Each song starts with Stuart Braithwaite’s dark, mesmeric guitar figures, builds inexorably to a multi-layered instrumental crescendo of noise and melody, gloriously sustains it, drops out, does it all again then stops. The interaction between the musicians is as ever remarkable. But they repeat it ten times.
On record, they call upon guests like Aidan Moffat, Gruff Rhys and even Braithwaite himself to break up the cycle by adding vocals, or, since Rock Action, bring other instrumentalists in, but beside Barry Burns’ synths, tonight we just get a tokenistic appearance on two tracks by an inaudible female cellist.
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OK, you can’t argue with a stunning Christmas Steps, or a breathtaking Mogwai Fear Satan (no Like Herod, blasphemously). But after any number of identical, lesser tracks, things begin to get – whisper it, dull.
Mogwai’s music at its best is amazing, but the “we do what we want and if you don’t like it that’s your problem” attitude may seem courageous, but is also a total cop-out.
Look, after 20+ years, Fugazi can play a two-and-a-half hour set of inspirational, challenging, ground-breaking, truly alternative rock music that never once gets predictable or dull. That’s a truly legendary band at work.
Mogwai probably sneer at Radiohead from Smug Indie Snob HQ, but would never dream of doing anything as brave as Yorke and friends did by dumping their guitars on Kid A.
When passion and integrity become replaced by self-satisfied, safe complacency, you may as well come from Camden. I hope the new album proves me wrong.
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