A Singing Mogwai!?

[imitationleather]

Does Orbital getting David Gray to sing on one of their songs count?

[willbo]

what about Prodigy when Keith sang more

[lipsink]

I bought a ticket to watch their live premiere of the new album last night and it sounds great. It almost made up for not seeing them live this year. It was also fascinating seeing a 2 minute clip of them recording the album during lockdown with the producer on Zoom. I'd love to see a full documentary of that.

[mobias]

what about Prodigy when Keith sang more

Shouting doesn't count.

[purlieu]

Does Orbital getting David Gray to sing on one of their songs count?

They had guest vocalists from the start, but yes, this was a career low point.

[Captain Crunch]

Isn't the best / worst example of this Earthless?  Absolutely top of the tree, peerless, cream of the crop instrumental band, no-one could touch them.  Then they added vocals (first on Black Heaven?) and it all turned to shit.  So sad. 

[Captain Crunch]

Excluding their devastating cover of 'Cherry Red' of course.  And considering the vocals there are supposed to be a funny 'squeal along when you get drunk enough' homage thing, it doesn't really count. 

[lipsink]

Silver Mt Zion were still great (but in a different way) once they started adding more vocals. It also helped make them feel like their own thing rather than a continuation of Godspeed You! Black Emperor.

[MrMrs]

they sound far better with vocals (asmz)

[purlieu]

Yeah, the first two ASMZ albums just feel like Small Godspeed, but once you get to Horses in the Sky they're a stunning band in their own right with their own sound.

My favourite 'post-rock' bands are Talk Talk, Bark Psychosis, Sigur Rós and ASMZ. I'm probably in the minority but clearly I think it all works much better with vocals.

[sevendaughters]

in the minority apparently that thinks ASMZ were miles better as a small chamber group.

[Dusty Substance]

David Holmes, who started out in the mid 90s as a trip-hop, loungey, sample-heavy DJ before becoming Steven Soderbergh's go-to guy for film scores, didn't sing on any of his records until 2008's fuzzy space-rock album The Holy Pictures. It was an OK record.

I'm pretty sure he never lent his vocals to another album but he was recruited by one N.Gallagher to produce his own fuzzy space-rock solo album.

[Rev+]

I've only seen Mogwai live the once, in the late 90s, but half of the set had vocals.  Stopping short of saying 'singing' because yer man is no singer and they don't really bother with a vocal melody, it's just some lyrics droned out.  Only bothered with their first album so I'd assumed that there was sung stuff on all of the ones after that.

[good times]

Slightly off topic but Mogwai always felt a bit like one of those "have their cake and eat it" bands

They get to project this image of being edgy/spiky bastards but a lot of their music is pretty drab (even, or perhaps especially on their classic early albums) and not particularly interesting compared to other bands in a similar genre.

I suspect a lot of it is due to being part of a scene that includes some genuinely edgy interesting bands like Arab Strap, or maybe their status as a bit of a gateway band to their more interesting influences, but it always puzzled me slightly. Could be that they're seen of pioneers of the genre...?

I know a lot of people who are into really interesting shit who seem to absolutely love Mogwai while hating on or disregarding other bands with a similar vibe.

I don't particularly like Post Rock (apart from a time about 20 years ago when I was heavily into GYBE and Sigur Ros) so might just be a taste thing.

[MrMrs]

arab strap are edge and interesting while mogwai are drab?

[axel]

Think your all crazy. Mogwai are great, and last weekends streaming gig was very good (if you like that sort of thing).

[mobias]

I can't say I listen to Mogwai a lot but I do like them. I think they've done some really interesting music which is generally a lot more dynamic and listenable to than most other tuneless post rock dirge I've heard.
I've not heard much of their recent stuff so can't comment on it. I've read a few recent interviews with them and its interesting that they seemed to have mellowed a lot since their early days. They always did seem
like a really angry reactionary band. Though I always liked and appreciated the fact they were born out of a hatred of britpop. So for that a alone I was on the same page as them right from the get go. 

[JaDanketies]

Yes Mogwai are very good and I don't listen to as much as I used to primarily because I don't have the opportunity to take acid as much as I used to. They've built a reputation in a hipster genre and it's not as if they got promoted by Syco, in fact they've got their own record label and I would believe they built their success largely on their own merits. They're hardly One Direction. 

[Famous Mortimer]

I saw them supporting Urusei Yatsura in...1996? 1997? Something like that. They were fucking incredible, and I have their setlist from that show inside a 7" somewhere.

And then I saw them maybe 10 years ago in London, and they were not great. People were audibly bored of their 5-minute outros for every song.

[PaulTMA]

Not rubbishing the genre, but there have definitely been swathes of 'post rock' bands (esp. late 90s/00s) formed because they could just about get away with it, not being able to write actual songs and all.  So also your drug casualty pals from your hometown's 'krautrock' band

[PaulTMA]

EDIT: double post, so here's this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZsuctrOE2CA&ab_channel=sbritt

[Pauline Walnuts]

Not rubbishing the genre, but there have definitely been swathes of 'post rock' bands (esp. late 90s/00s) formed because they could just about get away with it, not being able to write actual songs and all. 

In Defence of Mogwai:


People were bored with songs, and for a time Post Rock was new, interesting, and exciting. The bands either stopped making records, or didn't seem to develop or go interesting ways so I stopped listening to them in the early 00s, so maybe they did, I don't know.


Listens to Astro Chimp linkoid;

Same with Sterolab and those neo-Neu! bands, now Sterolab did progress, personally I couldn't stand that ghastly 60s French rubbish when they did. But they did at least progress. So that's a bonus.

[mobias]

Looks very like Mogwai are about to have their first number one album. I find the fact Mogwai are going to score a number one quite odd. Does this mean they've officially sold out? Are they no longer the cool outsiders? Have they ended up
becoming the very band 90's Mogwai would have hated? So many questions.....

[thugler]

Not rubbishing the genre, but there have definitely been swathes of 'post rock' bands (esp. late 90s/00s) formed because they could just about get away with it, not being able to write actual songs and all.  So also your drug casualty pals from your hometown's 'krautrock' band

Yeah agree with this, there's tons of post rock bands, but the ones worth listening to are the ones who do something slightly different with it. There are a lot of chancers just doing the quiet---LOUD thing with lots of delay and reverb. It's a good thing that the trend died out a bit. But the good stuff, which I include some of Mogwai in, is really fucking good. Tortoise and Do Make Say Think were my favourites.

[MrMrs]

overthinking it there, mobias

[sevendaughters]

it seems to me there were three distinct phases of post-rock

i. the bit when no one really knew what to call a bunch of bands that were deliberately eschewing rock tropes of yore, most of whom were coming out of Chicago and Boston but also the UK a little bit. I think this is when Simon Reynolds came up with the term (he focuses more on British groups like Disco Inferno and Seefeel). This is when it is at its most fertile because it is a non-scene, just a good time for white bands in the margins who seem to have been open-minded about technology and black forms like jazz and dub. I remember Q calling this era "when bands just wrote intros".

ii. the bit where a couple of bands break through that starts to codify rules around what post-rock is (quickly it was guitarcentric and instrumental). it gets whiter and rockier and less about texture and more about dynamic shifts, though there are still bands that are just quiet and refusenik or in tune with dub. bands that might have done better if they'd arrived earlier like Meanwhile Back In Communist Russia falter. Groups on the edges like Fridge, Hood, Movietone, Crescent, Piano Magic etc. seem to get booted in favour of Mogwai, GYBE, Tarentel, Tortoise.

iii. crescendocore. some of the bands from ii. like Mogwai and GYBE lean into their maximalist secular hallelujah and the only think left for bands to do is either be prettier (Explosions), louder (Jesu, Red Sparowes), return the dynamics to songs (Hope of the States) or attempt to be more intelligent (65DOS) by grafting IDM and math-rock time signatures onto otherwise twinkling guitars. You also see emo gain a lot from post-rock - The Appleseed Cast and This Town Needs Guns pretty much could only exist after post-rock.

It is weird to me that Mogwai might have a #1 record, but that sort of says more about record sales these days.

[Pauline Walnuts]

I'm getting 'Kranky Records catalogue inserts for goalposts' levels of nostalgia after that last post.






That's a good thing.

[jobotic]

God i love that one Movietone album I've got. Think there were only two.

[sevendaughters]

God i love that one Movietone album I've got. Think there were only two.

think there's 4! I've got Day and Night which is their best imo. Some of that Bristol/SW stuff is very satisfying late night music.

[Pauline Walnuts]

4.

https://www.discogs.com/artist/65825-Movietone

I used Discogs to catalogue my record colllection a couple of years ago, I was surprised by how much I had, and how little I had, in that groups I really liked, that I thought had only released 2 albums or something had gone on to release another 5 or something.

Oh, well.

90% of Post/math/rock is, possibly surprisingly, not worth that much in £sd. You would have been better off getting 90s limited vinyl of mainstream acts, if money was your God.