The current decline of the music industry is of course not so much a catastrophic collapse as a simple market correction: a delayed downturn that should've actually begun in the early 1980s, before major labels cajoled consumers into replacing their vinyl collections with shiny CD replications-- thereby artificially padding their bottom lines well into the 90s. But now that record companies have lost control of the means of production, it's funny to see the indie-rock industry resorting to the same behaviour: Making people buy the same albums over and over again, lavishing the reissue treatment not just onto era-defining classics (e.g., Pavement's Slanted and Enchanted: Luxe and Deluxe set), but also on albums that were simply very good. Just this spring alone we're being treated to 15th-anniversary editions of Liz Phair's Exile in Guyville, the Lemonheads' It's a Shame About Ray, and Sebadoh's Bubble and Scrape-- albums that were certainly much admired and analyzed in their 1993 inception, but which in 2008, don't really resonate far beyond nostalgic completists.
By that yardstick, Scottish post-rock perennials Mogwai are jumping the gun somewhat, reissuing their debut full-length album, Young Team, in an expanded double-disc edition barely a decade after it first appeared, and given that they've released a steady stream of mildly variable albums since then, it's not as if we've had much of a chance to miss them. But in this particular case, the reissue serves more of a practical than a canonical function-- the label that released Young Team in the U.S. in 1997, Jetset, went kaput several years ago, making what is still the band's most cohesive and consistently bracing album the hardest to find on these shores. But the timing is all the more appropriate given that Mogwai's most recent release, 2006's Mr. Beast, was their most perfunctory set of quiet/LOUD instru-metal to date, so it's an opportune time to revisit the album that made us care in the first place. And the fact that Young Team's influence can still be felt across the international indie-sphere-- not just in kindred art-rock spirits like Sigur Rós and Explosions in the Sky, but also avant-metal outfits like Boris and Pelican-- means the album exists today as something more vibrant than a museum piece.
For a mostly instrumental band, Mogwai have developed a reputation in the media for being big mouths who take no small delight in slagging other bands (hey guys, how about a 10th-anniversary reissue of those "blur: are shite" t-shirts?) and praising themselves. However, the spoken-word intro-- a friend reading out a gushing student-paper review of an early Mogwai performance-- that ushers in the slow-burn rapture of Young Team's "Yes! I Am Long Way From Home" feels less like a cheeky self-aggrandizing device than a rejection of the hollow Britpop hyperbole that was endemic to the era. But if Mogwai were determined to distance themselves from prevailing retro-rock fashions, Young Team evinced a nostalgic streak of its own, particularly for the pre-Britpop moment of 1988-91, when indie rock bands both American (Slint, Mercury Rev) and British (My Bloody Valentine, Bark Psychosis) were obliterating the parameters of rock music (and the VU meters that quantify them), before those groups either dissolved or turned more classic rock. So in a sense, Young Team was tending to unfinished business, bridging the continuum the connects shoegaze psychedelia to the anti-pop aesthetic and rhythmic thrust of the then-emergent post-rock.
But, of course, what distinguished Mogwai from the multitude of all-instrumental outfits jockeying for a Thrill Jockey deal was that their post-rock actually rocked. And to this day, nothing in their catalogue attests to this fact more than Young Team's startling second track, "Like Herod". Even when you heard it the first time, you knew the song's silently stalking momentum-- guided by Dominic Aitchison's deceptively melodic bassline-- would trigger an eruption of heavy-metal thunder that sounded like Slint soundtracking the shower scene in Psycho. But the tension lies not in question of whether the bomb is going to drop, but when, and this re-mastered reissue does a superb job of prolonging that feeling of impending doom-- during the song's second quiet stretch, you can hear Stuart Braithwaite and John Cummings' fretboard taps panning back and forth in the mix, like an unseen predator taunting you from some unseen location in the shadows before going in for a particularly savage kill. And after 11 years, I'm still never quite prepared for it.
At 11 minutes, "Like Herod" is actually only Young Team's second longest song; that honour belongs to 16-minute closer "Mogwai Fear Satan". Rather than resorting to sudden dynamic shifts, Young Team's colossal closer masterfully layers sheets of distortion, percussion and flute swirls over a repeated, ascending three-chord progression that-- despite the cacophony swarming around it-- projects a remarkable sense of calm. These two titanic tracks-- still staples of the band's live set-- have traditionally overshadowed the rest of Young Team's tracklist; listening to the album in its entirety today, what strikes you most is not so much Mogwai's brute force, but that these erstwhile piss-takers are capable of moments of great beauty and sensitivity: On the glockenspiel-gilded ballad "Tracy", random phone conversations are threaded into the mix, casting the mundane chit-chat in a overwhelmingly melancholic light, rendering the track as a requiem for someone who's no longer with us; on "R U Still In 2 It"-- Young Team's lone vocal track-- guest singer Aidan Moffatt of Arab Strap duets with Braithwaite on a devastating anti-love song that vividly captures a dead-end relationship being strung along by declarations of non-commital commitment.
Given how prolific Mogwai were in their formative years, much of what would normally be considered for anniversary-edition extras was already released 10 years ago, in the form of the Ten Rapid singles collection, the 4 Satin and No Education = No Future (Fuck the Curfew) EPs and the Kicking a Dead Pig remix collection. So all that this reissue's second "Appendix" disc can offer is one unreleased track (the suitably mournful "Young Face Gone Wrong"), a couple of compilation rarities, and a hearty serving of Young Team concert/radio-session recordings. The band's faithful version of Spacemen 3's "Honey" (taken from a 1998 tribute album) provides insight into Mogwai's more melodic influences, and seven-inch obscurity "I Can't Remember" finds the band toying around with a DJ Shadow-esque drum loop, but the live tracks mostly stick to the script-- the one revelation being that, in concert, Mogwai seem to be in more of a hurry to plow through "Like Herod" and "Mogwai Fear Satan", lopping several minutes off of each. Still, the version of "Satan" that closes this collection-- taken from Chemikal Underground's fifth anniversary party in 2000-- does add one sound effect that the original Young Team version merely implied: the sound of ecstatic applause confirming minds well blown.
