Outliving Rock
The Case of Mogwai
By Charlie Bertsch
After a career spanning over three decades, Mogwai remains relevant at a time when most of their peers have become nostalgia acts.
That’s a lesson forcefully communicated in Antony Crook’s 2024 documentary Mogwai: If the Stars Had a Sound, which concludes with fans describing what the Scottish band means to them. But you can derive it simply by listening carefully to their impressive catalogue.
Mogwai—currently Stuart Braithwaite, Dominic Aitchison, Martin Bulloch, and Barry Burns—have been persistent, finding ways to stay productive despite facing strong economic and aesthetic headwinds. That dedication paid a massive dividend in 2021, when their Dave Fridmann-produced pandemic album As the Love Continues improbably topped the UK album charts.
Just as importantly, they have been flexible.
When the market for alternative guitar rock contracted, displaced by hip hop and EDM, Mogwai diversified their brand. Although they continued to release traditional albums, they also began making soundtracks.
Since their score for the 2006 film Zidane: A Twentieth-Century Portrait, Mogwai have worked on a wide range of soundtracks, both alone and in collaboration with other artists.
In addition to Zidane, they have written music for the documentaries Atomic and Before the Flood; the feature-length dramas Kin and The Fountain; and the television series Les Revenants, ZEROZEROZERO, and The Bombing of Pan Am 103.
As multi-instrumentalist Burns put it in a 2016 interview, musing about the band’s future, “we started doing stuff for soundtracks. TV shows and stuff like that. And it means that you can still be pretty creative without having to go on tour all the time. So I’d like to be doing that”.
Generating enough income to survive without constantly being on the road is the biggest reason for diversifying in this manner. Another is reaching a different and potentially broader audience, including people who pay little attention to the ins and outs of popular music culture.
Other alternative musicians of Mogwai’s generation have gone the soundtrack route. Trent Reznor from Nine Inch Nails has had great success pairing with Atticus Finch. And so has Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood.
But there’s a crucial difference between Mogwai and those other artists. For the latter, there is a clear distinction between the scores they’ve written and the records that initially made their reputation. No one is going to confuse the soundtrack for The Social Network with Nine Inch Nails’ Pretty Hate Machine. Nor will anybody mistake the one for this year’s Best Picture favourite One Battle After Another with Radiohead’s OK Computer.
Mogwai, on the other hand, consistently blur the boundary between the band’s albums and their soundtrack work. Indeed, if you listen to their output from the past two decades on shuffle mode, it can be devilishly hard to tell their records apart.
There was a time in my life when I would have regarded this consistency as a drawback. Now I find it deeply admirable, the sign of artists who know precisely what they want to do and keep executing their plan to perfection.
When I strongly identify artists with a specific stage of my life, it’s hard to evaluate their subsequent work objectively. My mind wants to hear their more recent material on a continuum with what came before. This usually leads me to make unfavourable comparisons, perceiving either that they are repeating themselves, without adding much new, or because they have gone in a different direction incompatible with how I’ve classified them.
Occasionally, however, what artists do later in their careers demands a different way of thinking about their earlier work. What I heard during the period I identify with their music turns out to have been less compelling than what I now hear when I listen to their catalogue.
Mogwai is both an excellent example and an unusual one.
When I first discovered the band in the mid-1990s, I regarded their sound as another iteration of the alternative guitar bands I’d been loving for the previous half-decade, music that managed to get staggeringly loud while still feeling strangely soft, the swagger of classic rock turned inside out to reveal confusion and doubt.
Measured according to that standard, Mogwai seemed rather late to the party.
Although I liked their record Ten Rapid (1997) and listened to it frequently, I found it diffuse. The loud parts never seemed loud enough. And the quiet ones baffled me, prioritising granular detail that undermined the high-contrast aesthetic made popular by bands like Sonic Youth and My Bloody Valentine. At times, it seemed like I was hearing music coming from another room, muddied by its passage through the wall.
Mogwai’s next album Come On Die Young (1999) failed to dispel this impression. Despite having a cleaner mix than its predecessor, it still suffered from an excess of restraint. No matter how loud a track got, it still stopped short of rocking out.
In retrospect, my reluctance to embrace Mogwai fully had less to do with their music than it did with my own life. I discovered the band right after getting married, when I was nearing the end of my doctoral dissertation and trying to prepare myself mentally for becoming a parent.
In other words, I was concerned about going soft and thought I discerned a parallel trend in Mogwai’s music, which sometimes struck me as the alternative rock on mood stabilisers.
With the benefit of three decades’ worth of following the band, I now understand that what initially seemed like a weakness was a strength. Those early Mogwai albums performed a bait-and-switch, pulling in listeners desperate for the sugar high of the alternative revolution to last a little longer, while acclimating them to a post-rock world.
To put that insight in musical terms, I should have been hearing less Nirvana when I first discovered them and more Tortoise.
Mogwai’s soundtracks make this particularly clear. Even when a track seems to contain all the elements of a traditional alternative rock song—guitars, bass, and drums, played hard—the end result feels more like an Impressionist painting than the real thing, dissolving into abstraction if you study it too closely.
These days, Mogwai are venerated as elder statesmen of post-rock. Because their career dates back to the early days of that strange subgenre, their work still reverberates with the excitement of doing something new.
It helps that the band remains committed to playing on physical instruments. Although they were already including samples on their first releases, their nods to ambient and the collage aesthetic always remained on the margins of a sound rooted in the relationship between guitars, bass, and drums.
To move beyond rock without fraying the connection to its origins requires delicacy and humility.
As I listened to all of Mogwai’s records over the past week, I was struck by a quality that explains why their music is so soundtrack-friendly. Few artists have done a better job of collapsing the distinction between foreground and background. And even fewer have been able to do so while simultaneously problematising the relationship between the music’s loud and quiet parts.
Sometimes the sparse, muted passages in Mogwai songs would blend in with the work I was doing, only to have a sudden flurry of guitars make me pay attention. But sometimes the opposite would happen, with the loud portions fading from consciousness until the absence of volume woke me up.
It’s this versatility that makes the band special.
From a musical perspective, Mogwai show how to incorporate rock music into lives that initially seemed to have no room for it. But their example also serves an allegorical function.
As we face the terrifying prospect of entire occupations being rendered obsolete overnight, the fact that a modest band from Glasgow persevered long enough to be nominated for a Mercury Prize and have a documentary made about them demonstrates that it’s possible to outlive your own extinction, so long as you never stop moving and always open your mind to new possibilities.
Photograph courtesy of John Perivolaris. Published under a Creative Common license.