Mogwai, "Travel Is Dangerous"

Stuart Braithwaite once said: "Any band that doesn't rock is pish."

The band finally realized that their studio recordings now sound out-of-step with the skull-scraping explosions of their live shows (or more realistically, they finally decided to do something about the disparity). Hence, we have the chatter in advance of their forthcoming album "Mr. Beast" (what a shit title) that hypes the album as a return to the more balls-out sound of "Young Team".

Influence among contemporaries is reciprocal, and on the basis of "Travel Is Dangerous", bands like Aereogramme are influencing Mogwai far moreso than the reverse. I have a feeling that the new album has absorbed a considerable amount from "ambient metal" bands like Isis and Pelican. "Travel Is Dangerous" is massive, and on this one track at least, they've thankfully kept the gargantuan sound without resorting to gargantuan track lengths (there's a reason why I get kinda bored after hearing two or three Isis tracks in a row).

My (slight) perception is that the "Young Team" pluggers have lost a bit of steam over the last couple of years, leading to an increasing prevalence of opinion that Mogwai are still peaking. If "Mr. Beast" turns out to be Slint trying to play early 90's Soundgarden at maximum volume, then initial feedback about the album should quickly and definitively prove me right or wrong (those who hate it will stand it up to "Young Team", and those who love it will probably declare it the long-awaited successor to "Young Team").

I listened to "Come On Die Young" today and it's obvious that it hasn't dated well in the context of the music they've been making ever since. I still love it and now have even more appreciation for the absurdly difficult task they assumed for themselves -- namely, making an album where the first forty minutes constitute one exceedingly long build-up. Some people claim that nothing happens during those first forty minutes, with a bland and featureless slog stretching all the way to "Ex-Cowboy" (I disagree). However, I do find that "CODY" feels very, very remote from the "ideal" Mogwai album where they finally peak (more on that in a moment).

So what's wrong with "CODY"? Dave Fridmann is a big part of it. Like Albini (who would hate the allusions + comparisons I'm about to make), Fridmann uses a formula in the studio and simply plugs each band into his formula. That's not really a criticism, because bands work with him for exactly that reason. No matter what their recordings sounded like before, Fridmann laces them with a spacey, warm-fi, "recorded in the midst of a grassy field" quality. His formula isn't particularly versatile, which is why "CODY" is so homogeneous compared to something like "Rock Action", which regularly shifts from industrial crunch to Verve-y balladry throughout its running length (a full half hour shorter than "CODY"!) For me, "Rock Action"'s kitchen sink approach comes closest to the ideal because it shows the band doing so many things so incredibly well -- often all in the same track ("2 Rights 1 Wrong" keeps twisting itself into confounding shapes with each listen ... their best ever song?) Throw it together with the best of "Happy Songs For Happy People", which showed them capable of writing soaring, epic, heart-wrenching melodies deserving of inclusion of the best soundtracks never made, and you might end up with an album that tops "Loveless".