Glasgow somehow doesn't connect with me as it's supposed to most of the time. I hear about these supposedly great bands that come from there, and mostly I get very bad Sonic Youth ripoffs or wanky indie nothing. Nearly all of this band's labelmates fill me with an active disdain, the Delgados and their yawn into the void, Bis and their talent for little but annoying the fuck out of me in ways that (say) the B-52's never did, Urusei Yatsura's ultimately painful exercise in arguing that Pavement was somehow at all in the slightest bit special and that we should all still only be listening to Love and Sister while we're at it -- oh god! The memories, the painful memories.
But there's always an exception, isn't there?
Oh, and is there.
I said before about Mogwai about how the argument often is they're just ripping off Slint. And I'll say it again -- if that were the case, I'd prostrate myself before Slint. As it is, I've listened to Tweezerland maybe once or twice in my life since colleagues of mine at KLA proclaimed it the second coming. And Young Team? Quite the different story.
So what makes them more epochal, more gripping to my heart? Is it the fact that the band admit to a fierce, burning love of Joy Division while carefully avoiding the cloning factor too many others have fallen into, using spectral pianos more than once to convey that same sense of something in the offing, unable to be exactly named? Maybe, maybe. Is it the fact that they almost always avoid vocals, letting the music trace its own images in my head instead, and when they do have vocals, like that guy from Arab Strap (a Mogwai labelmate who actually catches my ear) on "R U Still in 2 it," simple over a gentle guitar, it all fits nicely? Is it the way that "Yes! I am a long way from home" and "Like Herod" play with dynamics and length in ways that stir my soul in ways I can't even try to accurately define, a rush and a joy in the saddest of ways at the same time? All these things, more. I can't really ever closely nail it down, but I'm trying, I'm trying, the waltz-time swing on "Summer (Priority Version)" with those beautiful tones amid the fuzz, "With Portfolio" and its keyboard start and crumbling, speaker-to-speaker collapse, and more.
Even the, to me, lesser tunes like "Katrien" have a certain evocative something to them, the sense of being strange signals from some unknown place, the vocals buried beneath the music, and above all the intensity, the sense of push and rip. At their calmest, something is still happening, and they are not often calm on this record. And when something of purest calm comes, like "Tracy," which never never NEVER fails to send chills down my back and put tears in my eyes, even with that nutty phone conversation taped at both ends of the song, as I hear the guitars stretching beautifully into a clear blue/black night sky, a sheer utter stunning beyond words, a peace beyond measure, the soft bells up front, I am beyond everything. You cannot take this from me.
And "Mogwai Fear Satan"? No, I can't start on it. We'd be here forever.