Iggy sounds dead at the start, actually. Not that he is dead or that he's hoarsely whispering or something. He sounds like a voice from some forgotten past, something that just doesn't exist anymore, couldn't even be imagined. Something beaming out from somewhere that we can't approach, that we don't belong to anymore. And it's just a sample from some late-seventies thing somewhere, god knows where, and the music is just right, spectral, not really there.
Mogwai may not be punk rock, but who the hell knows what they are. If they really were Slint knockoffs, I'd actually actively like Slint a lot -- I don't mind Slint, but Slint never made me stop in my tracks. Mogwai had already done that a lot of times by the time this album came out, and damn if they didn't go ahead and do that to me, again, and again. Knowing that they worship Joy Division is reason enough in ways, knowing that they love the hell out of My Bloody Valentine helps, knowing that they got Richard Formby of Spacemen 3-connections in on the title track for a bit of slide guitar mournfulness that matches just about the one song-with-lyrics they've done, reaching for that sublime melancholy which Low know about and getting there in the oddest of ways, knowing that Luke Sutherland of Long Fin Killie is the one on "Christmas Steps" with the violin at the ending, knowing just how to end and how to make it all end, all these things are important.
They know some brilliant stuff and are not content to pay homage, so when Laetitia Sadier groused about how the fact they liked brilliant bands didn't make them brilliant, she not only wrapped herself pretty damn well in a certain level of hypocrisy ("Krautrock? What's that? Never heard of Neu!" or whatever they told my friend ML in the early days), she pretty much demonstrated she wasn't even listening to them. More's the pity.
The other gripe I heard about this album is that it was just Young Team all over again, which I can't fathom. When I heard this, all I could think about was how different it was instead. Instead of exultant, soaring power, there's a deep deep blue-into-black thing throughout. Everything is restrained, toned down, except at points, and the huge sudden explosive shifts don't happen much, and when they do, they are grown into rather than appearing out of nowhere, like the move up and then withdrawal on "Kappa" or the crumbling, crackling, soft way "Ex-Cowboy" makes you want to gulp down a big cry; you build into the brilliance and final head-rush of "Christmas Steps" only to be lost in the elegiac ending regardless. So instead I hear the sports broadcast noise on "Helps Both Ways" and the soft, careful strums and the gentle bells on "May Nothing But Happiness Come Through Your Door" and the way the piano sounds are reversed and brought forward on "Chocky" just right, and so much more, and I just want to sob and sigh a bit. How else can I react?
Clearly about the only way to end the century, actually, because it's all about ending. A final wrap-up; not the 'last rock album' or any of that crap, and clearly life is happening all around us and there's some wonderful, lively stuff in existence in the music world and elsewhere. Yet this still feels like an ending, a conclusion, a final period at the end of the paragraph; even the final song title ends with the word "Antichrist," even if the words before it in the title are "Puff Daddy."