My favorite Mogwai memory dates back several years, when I had just gotten to know the band via their inestimable first full-length Young Team. I was poking around in Boston's Newbury Comics, as I often did in college, and that album was playing on the store sound system. When it came to "Like Herod" I positioned myself in a corner so I could watch everyone in the entire store jump about three feet in the air when the song made its abrupt shift from meditative quiescence to ear-splitting guitar squall, and I have to admit I jumped a bit myself-- even though I knew it was coming. At their best, Mogwai are a band with the power to move people-- emotionally as well as viscerally-- and Mogwai did both on that album, triggering a crushing avalanche of praise they've been trying to dig out from ever since.
The end result of all that praise was that the band couldn't stay the same without being called one-trick ponies and couldn't move on without being labeled charlatans, but they moved on anyway and survived the feeding frenzy, not to mention plenty of critical indifference. None of their subsequent albums have been as good as Young Team, but each has held its own, and Government Commissions-- a cleverly-named new career-spanning compilation of BBC sessions mostly curated by the late John Peel-- makes this case better than perhaps the albums themselves. Revolving around a crushing, intensely visceral 18-minute performance of "Like Herod" that blows the already amazing original album version to kingdom come, the non-chronological tracklist emphasizes the consistency of the band's output and gives Mogwai a chance to show that the quality of later tracks like Come on Die Young's "Cody" or Rock Action's "Secret Pint" compare favorably to earlier, more widely acclaimed songs like Young Team's "R U Still In 2 It" and the 4 Satin EP's "Superheroes of BMX."
The versions of the songs the band floats through (unlike a lot of post-rock bands, Mogwai don't plod, they float) differ enough from the originals that fans will feel rewarded listening to them, but not so much that the record couldn't serve as a decent introduction to the band. Selections range generously across the group's discography, pulling from each full-length and a few EPs. John Peel's comforting voice (he truly was amazing) introduces Mogwai as the disc kicks off-- the band dedicates the album to him in the liners-- and they shuffle in with a bobbing take on "Hunted by a Freak", which also opened their latest studio effort.
From there, the album follows a well-sequenced arc that reaches an early peak on "R U Still In 2 It", and builds tension again through EP and Come on Die Young material-- including a mellifluous reading of that album's "Cody", one of the few vocal tracks present. The whole thing climaxes with "Like Herod", and as I said earlier, this version takes the cake and eats it too, rolling through its complex, low-key intro before bursting into a rage. The second burst is even more powerful and they draw it out into a crazed, 10-minute freakout that dumps you nicely into the hovering beauty of "Secret Pint".
Bottom line is that Mogwai are an insanely powerful live band, and these sharp recordings play like a unified set rather than a scraped-together compendium of disparate sessions. And though it's impossible to call this a proper "Best of Mogwai" disc, owing mostly to the absence of a version of "Mogwai Fear Satan", it's both a fine introduction to the band and a definite must for any fan, especially anyone who's seen them in person and wanted something that came close to capturing the experience.
