Though few of their songs contain actual words, Mogwai have always been fond of big statements. Having emerged during the late-1990s post-rock boom, the Scottish quintet used every means possible to distance themselves from the sullen stereotype that defined so many instrumental art-rock brooders of their era. EP titles were turned into protest placards, interviews inevitably became merciless slag fests, and concert t-shirts doubled as a form of music criticism. Even the abrupt calm-to-chaos eruptions that defined the band’s 1997 debut, Young Team, seemed to be delivered with devious, mischievous grins. So naturally, the band came up with a doozy of a title for their second album (and the first to receive a proper U.S. release via Matador): Come On Die Young, a two-fingered retort to the “Live Forever” platitudes of the Britpop they so despised.
As such, it was no surprise that Mogwai’s would open the album with a song called “Punk Rock:”, even if it wasn’t a punk rock song at all. Rather, overtop a foreboding, percussion-less guitar instrumental, we hear the voice of Iggy Pop in a televised 1977 interview with Canadian broadcaster Peter Gzowski, explaining the difference between the commoner’s caricatured conception of punk and his own more spiritual, empowering interpretation of the term. But as much as it overtly asserts Mogwai’s allegiance to the rock iconoclasts of yore, the track also betrays the band’s own frustration with being misunderstood; beyond being propped up as post-rock poster boys, Mogwai had been variously hyped as the Scottish Slint and the new Pink Floyd. Tellingly, “Punk Rock:” ends on an open-ended note, with an increasingly exasperated Iggy asking Gzowski, “Do you understand what I’m saying, sir?” The question is left hanging in the ether, as if to suggest that no amount of reasoning will change the opinions of those who’ve already made up their mind about you.
So on Come On Die Young, Mogwai went about becoming the most sullen, brooding post-rock band they could possibly be, with each melancholic guitar refrain and desolate, dead-of-night snare-drum tap serving as a deliberately set breadcrumb trail to more Spiderland comparisons. But by playing to post-rock type, Come On Die Young ultimately expanded Mogwai’s emotional vocabulary. Where they once shocked with volume and dissonance, Come On Die Young disarms with elegance and grace. Even the sudden, eardrum-blasting jolts of Young Team signature “Like Herod” are no comparison to the surprise that occurs when the ominous, pressure-building hum of “Punk Rock:” dissolves into the teary-eyed tranquility of “Cody”, which sees Mogwai hitch themselves to Galaxie 500’s “Tugboat” and—thanks to a rare and surprisingly affecting lead vocal from guitarist Stuart Braithwaite—produce the most quietly devastating song in their canon to date.
By uncanny coincidence, this 15th-anniversary reissue arrives mere weeks after Slint’s more randomly timed 23rd-anniversary Spiderland box set was released, but revisiting both records in tandem highlights their differences as much as their similarities. Here, Mogwai aren’t so much copying Slint as envisioning the more expansive, exploratory band they could’ve evolved into: “Year 2000 Non-Compliant Cardia” may swipe its jagged opening strums straight from the “Good Morning Captain” playbook, but redirects them into a slumberous, opium-den psychedelia that counts as one of this album’s few moments of levity; “May Nothing But Happiness Come Through Your Door” embellishes the “Cortez the Killer”-inspired lurch of Slint’s “Washer” with glockenspieled counter-melodies and a gradually intensifying climax. And in lieu of creepily whispered Brian McMahan-style narratives, Come On Die Young sees Mogwai deploy found-sound dialogue to equally unnerving effect. The mournful “Helps Both Ways” is interlaced with color commentary from an NFL game, but far from undermining the track’s mournful tone, the chatter enhances it—the song feels like a cathode-ray-lit crime scene, as if we’re surveying the aftermath of some terrible domestic tragedy while "Monday Night Football" unsympathetically blares in the background.
So much instrumental rock music is often described as “soundtracks to movies that don’t exist,” but Come On Die Young always felt like the unofficial score to a film that did. Four months after the album was released, The Blair Witch Project hit theaters, and my memories of each tend to blur into one: there’s the shared desolate woodlands setting (the album was recorded at Dave Fridmann’s Tarbox Road Studios in Upstate New York) and chilly, frosty-breath atmosphere (thanks to Fridmann’s uncharacteristically stark, I-can’t-believe-it’s-not-Albini production), never mind the fact that Come On Die Young’s eerie cover shot of bassist Dominic Aitchison could easily pass for a still from the film. And most tellingly, like Blair Witch, Come On Die Young moves at a slow, subtle, incremental pace that can test one’s patience and make one long for the high-voltage immediacy of Young Team, but oh-so gradually ratchets up the tension. The heart-palpitating payoff finally arrives in the form of late-album colossi “Ex-Cowboy” and “Christmas Steps”, which once again see Mogwai charting new extremes of effects-pedal abuse, but without overwhelming the songs’ expertly chiseled definition.
That sense of discipline is all the more apparent when wading through the bounty of bonus material on this deluxe edition. While none of the demos here differ dramatically from their finished versions, you get a clearer picture of just how much studious fine-tuning went into the final tracklist: in its original form, “Christmas Steps” was a couple of minutes shorter, before the band wisely decided to stretch out its nerve-wracking build-up even longer; a rough-sketch version of “Punk Rock:” suggests even this seemingly simple composition underwent a few passes before achieving the right spectral ambience. (“Hugh Dallas”, meanwhile, would have been a keeper on any other Mogwai release, but its breathy Braithwaite vocal and elegiac sway drift a bit too closely to “Cody”.)
Some supplementary tracks, on the other hand, provide a welcome respite from Come On Die Young’s meticulous approach: the included Travels in Constants, Vol. 12 EP—a limited-edition release for Temporary Residence’s mail-order series—both hearkens back to the post-shoegaze drone of Mogwai’s earliest work, while anticipating the anthemic surges of the subsequent Rock Action. The EP’s mix of tremulous guitar reverberations, flute-like melodies, and pretty piano reveries may boast a decidedly different tenor and texture than Come On Die Young, but are nonetheless a product of that album’s guiding philosophy: For all its seeming ideological alignment with crash-and-burn punk-rock nihilism, Come On Die Young is the sound of Mogwai committing themselves to the long haul.
