What Mogwai does on Young Team is that they focus on the little things. They highlight what other bands would ignore, and bring them to the surface, and make them the flux of a song. They have this ability to remove any artifice from the song, and present ideas in their purity, which is something most artists can’t do. The opener, “Yes! I Am a Long Way From Home” shows this. The opening progression feels like in a way it could be used by a simple and dull emo band to form the crux of one of their songs, yet Mogwai twist it subtly, by adding a sense of importance to the notes, and the music, and by allowing the sounds to float through your brain, before having the song build up to a conclusion which shows off their post rock sensibilities, conforming that, yes, Young Team is nothing like anything you have heard before.
And so it’s a problem for me trying to review Young Team, because I’m afraid of repeating myself when talking about the album. Young Team is simple, but so utterly unique, a band with a vision for an entirely new soundscape and then, over the course of an hour exploring ever single space of that soundscape. Nothing is like Young Team, because Young Team is music. Which sounds normal, but is so utterly rare, a band trusting their sound and using sound as a way of communicating. The best way of describing Young Team is the clip at the beginning of “Yes! I Am A Long Way From Home”, saying “music can put human beings in a trance like state…..music is bigger then words and wider then pictures”.
The sounds feel like a thick black, not dark or morbid, but deep and colourful, like the rest of the album it feels as though Mogwai is trying to destroy the preconceptions of everything people might bring to music like this, and whether you have the cover of a japanese street corner or the simple black cover seen above, it shows that off.
There are variations within Young Team. The album moves between epics which incorporate quiet/loud dynamics and post rock pedal manipulation (Like Herod, Mogwai Fear Satan), smaller songs of damp guitar lines , sometimes building to a smaller incorporation of post rock (Yes! I Am A Long Way From Home, Katrien, Summer (Priority Version)), quieter, simpler songs like R U Still Into It, Tracy, and Radar Maker. Then there’s something so starkly striking as A Cheery Wave From Stranded Youngsters, and the mind-blowing With Portfolio, which actual gives you the feeling of sound rushing through your mind, in one ear and out the other, back and forth like a ping-pong match being played through your head.
The real credit has to go to Mogwai Fear Satan. The 16 minute epic closer, There are few songs as brilliantly constructed, that use quiet/loud dynamics and the art of adding distortion and walls of sound to add more and more and allowing a song to build, as this one. There are few songs as unabashedly beautiful as this one. Emotion wells up in the heart, and everything in life becomes complete. It’s beautiful and, in contrast with the rest of the album, joyful. Those drums contain a perfect beat to bring us in, and to make us part of this world. And it is a brilliant world. It’s nameless really. Like the rest of Young Team, you have to listen to it to understand.
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