My Review: Mogwai - The Bad Fire

 

Mogwai - The Bad Fire

A desert finds its source in the sonic bridge of a time spent leaving traces of vibrations in the hope of a landing place, where getting lost and finding oneself is but a beginning.

It was 1995 and everything was falling apart, in the middle heart of a decade in which beauty and ugliness were convincing without osmosis, without megaphones and without silences at the same time.

A couple of Scottish friends chose an epitaph as a sprint, a flash to be extinguished by research, theoretical, on how sound could be enslaved by the beauty of rhythmics and harmonies in search of a parasol. They have always rejected the definition of a Post-Rock band, of pioneers of that genre, and they have done well: if you spend time with the wrong ones, seizing the moment is practically impossible.

The new album does not celebrate 30 years of their career, but rather starts with cycles of chemotherapy of a young daughter.

Nothing artistic but the desire to silence a frustration, a pain, a neurotic avalanche of expanding explosions. Dowsing songs are born, emotions that become expedients, the harmonic rustle of a strange series of conversions, here elevated to the emotional carpet that leaves burrs and flowers overweight, because this work narrates, explains, brings happiness to life through temporal and educational seasons, in a jolt calculated to anaesthetise fears and useless tensions.

The band's intuitions, balustrade and strong moral, since the days of pompous Brit-Pop, have built in the sonic garden of these fingertips a series of intentions that in The Bad Fire find a new resource: to create not only cinematic flows, sound fables and the possibility that imagination has no gags, but rather baggage and handholds, in a story that specifies how the human soul is the first of the planets. The choice of misleading titles (always an attitude that appeared as a desecrating act not to make the pieces a serious thing), reaffirms the concept that in this unique, almost purely instrumental mode live words, thoughts, impulses, brakes and the sparkle of a beam that, between noise and sweetness, defines understanding as a fortuitous gesture and not as a sum of capacities.

A hymn to joy, one to the consecration of the mood that must be taken seriously as adults, one to the pressure of mutant spaces, and yet always with an innovative and surprising willingness to allow joy to tread these grooves. And it is pop, rock, dream pop, alternative, psychedelia, but above all a serious game that searches for the sky and slaps it down with some textures where electronics is by no means an icy thermometer, but rather a new way of generating warmth. 

Diversified approaches, instruments used as a melting pot to which new instructions can be given, to generate intoxicating layers where it is not the journey that counts, but remaining anchored in one's own emotional territory.

One loses oneself in these flights, in these voids, in these jumps and in these frictions, to compose unshakable dreams, doubts and certainties, not to flee but to encounter a world free of syllables and sterile and useless approximations.

Here come Pink Floyd, the Velvet Underground, Television and an impressive series of bald notes, without burrs, without presumptions: the sound (father/master and servant) is this time only the splinter that leaves more pleasure than pain, offers the idea that in the uncertainty of meaning those musical bundles find a cosy bed.

Stuart and Barry have never written songs: they have sought refuge where precisely Post-Rock has placed barriers, stakes and stylistic and attitudinal boundaries. The two are intelligent souls, privateers of the unknown who seek out followers and on the backs of their scores leave the dew of these notes stuttering but never waning, never falling, always, instead, in an ascending flight. What is torpid the two disinfect it, giving the other two members a free garden in which to drop duty and seek a game where hypothesis is never a sterile blotting paper.

Here's My Bloody Valentine and the shoegaze period from 1991 to 1993 offer the Scottish band some trails to follow, with more sadness and nastiness...

There is no pressure, much less conditioning in these streams: music as open windows in the middle of a meadow with no houses, to establish a pact that transcends limits, to produce, as a primary objective, a series of songs that are the words, the gestures, the steps that go round and round in the grooves of a vinyl record that then rises up and leaves everyone without a foothold. Poetry? No! It is definitely an attempt to celebrate a new behavioural vocabulary, in which the disregard for time, art and the obligatory can be anaesthetised. Notes as drops under glass, voices as silent solos without the need for beautiful singing.

Perhaps these roads that invoke an imminent emotional perspective can also bring about a suspension of that sand that in the hourglass only knows gravity. Mogwai create a science-fiction epic, hydrating the habits of experiencing listening as enclosures and finally determining an ordeal that knows how to show rays of sunshine and rainbows on a festive day.

Organs, pianos, harpsichords, mellotrons: these are instruments that are discreetly positioned in the flows, never protagonists but rather gregarious in a complexity that, track after track, manages to make its way into comprehension. But there are others, because in the clamorous work of production it was decided to make the grafts subtle, leaving the solos the task of not being redundant, but the first pupils of a timid respect for an ordered puzzle conceived to leave the ears disoriented in the belly of a flight. There are no signs of tension, of awkwardness, of discord: does that seem little?

They are the directors of an avant-garde that, when free of the desire for useless definitions, will be able to indicate new strategies. The 90s, after all, were an infection for them and, in this new millennium, anything that allows for temporal jumps, between kangaroos and shrimps, can establish the effectiveness of a pleasant confusion that makes the mind a colourful ivy...

The basses are at times unfocused, the guitars often take on the guise of stunned keyboards, the drumming often seems to anticipate: yes, there are glaring errors on the album, on a technical level, not everything fits together perfectly and it is precisely this element that makes it an analogue record in the time of digital, leaving imprecision a wonderful sceptre.

There are no dreams in the tracks, no screams, no exaggerations: everything appears as a village in flight with no intention of taking up residence, a walking with curiosity to precede consciousness.

The time has come to look these compositions in the face and give them a dagger lined with grace, slow and sensual, where they can kiss this hill of running petals...

Song by Song

1 - God Gets You Back

A synth opens the sky, sounds like a restrained delirium, a slowness with the feeling that a speed is imminent and contagious. But it is in this loop that strings of guitars are deposited with a restrained reverb to hold the tension like a switch that explains, from the outset, what will be illuminated in the continuation. When the drumming decides to present the bill to the awkward primordial beauty, one realises how the Scottish band has found an orange oil in the veins of intuition. Hypnosis and delirium...

2 - Hi Chaos

We were talking about mistakes, about non-synchronicity, and here we are faced with one of those moments: where there is a space revealed and not hidden, the sky gods spread smiles. What happens in the second track? We enter into the fullness of the album's title which, in Scotland, means Hell. We meet it, then, in its earthquakes, in its exaltations, in the lanes of thunderstorms and of a chaos to which, like a mantra to which one would like to say no, one entrusts one's pleasure, with the final part of the song teaching how Post-Rock with Mogwai is a sterile and repetitive exercise. Here they play with fire that slows and beats, for it is in slowness that pain finds its perfect throne. The final guitars and bass drive the effects back into a beautiful bath of humility, leaving the song in its disarming perfection...

3 - What Kind of Mix is This?

The introduction (a celestial mantra celebrating Television's second album as they take a walk with Cardiacs) resembles a distorted chain looking for a void to fall into: minimalist until the feet reveal how the pedalboard is just a game to create quality and not hide technical limitations... Here, then, is a swinging hiss that is embraced by silk sticks and fingers that produce wonderful toxins on a bass keyboard...

4 - Fanzine Made Of Flesh

Mogwai are punk, totally punk, punk without identity, madmen without strategy, painters who paint nothingness. 

And when they speak, when they sing, when they are melodic vocals over a distorted, deserted bass, then you understand how the talent to invite a pop refrain to show its skin is nothing more than the centre of gravity of that furious musical and cultural genre...

5 - Pale Vegan Hip Pain

Minimalism, fear that seeks a caress, a tear that doesn't want to die, a winter that fears the sun's spring rays: these are the protagonists of this ballad so close to prayer, for a brilliant thermal condition that seems to land in the confines of Kurosawa, on an evening when the cinema could be the only closet in which to hide. The track starts out slow, proceeds in the same way, but performs a crazy miracle: when the cluster of guitar notes seeks descent, here is the synth, with mammoth sweetness, accompanying this trail of water to the edges of a compelling, enveloping sadness…

6 - If You Find This World Bad, You Should See Some Of The Others

You try to relax, in these seven minutes, in which everything sounds like a thesis of a drama searching for wings. Instead: Mogwai prefer tension, they remove the protection from the emotional cables and keep them in a bain-marie, here suspense is an old trick but still capable of conveying consciousness and trembling. A tale, a journey where the instruments experience the intensity of bubbles held by the hair...

7 - 18 Volcanoes

The ignorant always stop at precipitation, at definition without patience. Here is a perfect example: in the first few seconds a foolish multitude might think of a combination of Sonic Youth and Marlene Kuntz. But the band plays at recapturing the magic of krautrock without photocopying it, throwing themselves into the circle of respect for the most hypnotic Beatles to the point of kissing the Velvet Underground with these driven, magnetic distortions. 

The last few minutes are a sonic cry, slowing down the beats by sedating the will of the bass and drums to be the architects of deflagrating surprises. And yes, there is a crescendo, but with simply perfect reins...

8 - Hammer Room

Let there be a rainbow, an afternoon party in a valley crowded with peace and beautiful dreams. Baroque music lends its flank, but then this combo throws itself on the petals kneaded with reflections and everything becomes modern, even more effervescent to the point of allowing the snare drums to direct the sounds towards a robotics that seems to create the right pause in this album that never ceases to confirm and surprise. The guitar solos are minimalist, precise, without smearing of unnecessary excess effects, and when the sound becomes a syringe, the party is over...

9 - Lion Rumpus

Again light, wind, lightness, with the seventies prog children longing for contact. The only track where the lead guitar searches for the bull's eye, but careful listening reveals how the synchronisation of time-space leads the impression to become a certainty: the band has found a perfect excuse to give a short song a feeling of eternity

10 - Fact Boy

There's no two without three: the album ends with a parade of lights, of rolls that bless the melody and structure of a prolonged sound that seeks celestial ascent. The rock here sweeps, wanting no footholds, wrestling with the stop-and-go at the slightest end, to leave these continuous snares the benefit that the metrics can also be a distorted impression. And it concludes in a colourful jaunt with the hope that all the grim but not serious moments of this jewel can generate the memory of a period that does not feed memory to find awareness...

   Stuart Braithwaite (Guitar, Vocals)

Barry Burns (Guitar, Piano, Synthesizer, Vocals)

Dominic Aitchison (Bass Guitar)

Martin Bulloch (Drums)

Producer: John Congleton

Label: Rock Action

Alex Dematteis

Musicshockworld

Salford

25th January 2025

My Review: Midas Fall - Cold Waves Divide Us

Midas Fall - Cold Waves Divide Us

The lane of elegance has a remarkable space in dreams, a teeming of intact fragments that enthrall listening and viewing souls, transporting shadows into the spotlight. What ensues is ecstasy in repetition, amidst oscillations and tremors. Music can represent all this as conduit, investigation and a thick containing web. If the Scottish band Midas Fall does this, then myocardial paralysis is instantly guaranteed, as the genesis of fragility in search of oxygen. The duo (now a trio) performs the most remarkable miracle one could only remotely hope for: they write a live genuflection, an invisible concert, directly in our rooms, like a private, unique, hardly avoidable affair, to signal a first incandescent act of total falling in love, as the tail end of a long career in which the fifth disc does nothing more than collect, sow, invent from hypothetical oscillations of the mood a defined, precise structure, an invasion of the lane of our pretended equilibrium.

Tabula rasa yes, but feathery, oxygenated with algid protean beauty, in the midst of the circle of emotions that are only the tail end of a mental palace that verbalises instincts, radiant days in the half-light and the fatigue of manifesting the talent of these compositions that attract the pulse towards the fatigue of containing them all.

More intimate, less dreamy (it sounds like an oxymoron, a blasphemy, but sooner or later you'll realise it's not so...), raw with the melancholy that underlines the power of these drops that, even when they fall hard, know how to use noise like a feather soaked in sunshine...

Elizabeth Heaton and Rowan Burn are two fairies who ignore the success, the poses, the public needs that only sow dispersion. They collect the breaths, the thoughts, and, with a kitchen whisk, condense their intimate quest into a golden helmet where everything is amalgamated and placed in the fridge of the heart. They have grown, they have generated sound pills not as children but as brushes and colours to be thrown into the wind. 

Now, more than ever, they live on continuous play, a coming and going from the core of forms, a very careful use of branches, in which post-rock, progressive and shoegaze are glued to the material of mental penetration, making the choice that each scalpel is capable of not stopping on the first layer of the skin of these songs. This explains the intensity, the restrained explosion to generate, rather, a more silent din, circumstantiated by the need to use notes as glue, as paper on which to write an irrepressible DNA: that of description. 

The willingness to call in Michael Hamilton, also a multi-instrumentalist and producer, allowed for the extension of the songwriting phase, as if indeed one more member would make this ‘concert’ that is Cold Waves Divide Us an unrepeatable exchange of gifts, in a period not of grace but of real capacity in search of a permanent fixative, to allow this live performance to never end.

One finds oneself in the vision of the world, in the lock of a door where each of us lives the secrecy of our existence, in the dump of faded dreams, of wills devoid of bite, and then anaesthetises joy in order to make it come to life with these small notes that, set, become boulders full of mountain flowers, in flight, enchanted and enchanting, without end.

The three of them are the funnel into which every tear falls, every intimate emotional resurrection, because they know how to dig into the vicissitudes of the individual expressions of musical notes, to correct contemporary music's unwise choice to seek success. True art always has its back to the audience...

Wedges, firecrackers, kisses with blue lipstick and demijohns of wine enter these songs to inebriate, stun, move and make listening a swirling inferno.

Ethereal music that warms the fire buried in the veins, adrenalin that comes out of the anaesthesia of mediocre listening, continuous elaborations on the structures that make every second of listening a millennium in the beats of our heart. Stunned angels, wandering among the cradles of needs not granted to us, reproducing enchantments and suggestions, drawing impetuses and reflections, together.

The movements, the twists, the conduction of the guitars are linked to the strings, the rarely powerful drumming, the bass that measures the shape condition of the dreams and supports them, and then to the expression of the uvula, on which sooner or later the Old Scribe will write a book.

But, unlike all my colleagues, I would like to stress that the musical parts are the real oil well, the vocal fuse, an embrace that allows each of the band members to explore a different universe. Of course, hers is the best in the last twenty years and her singing is simply devastatingly beautiful, irrepressible, the mother of every shuddering tear, a sensory spring that smears the face with liquids in continuous dispersion.

But she is not alone. Not only does she conquer and penetrate. One must have the courage to affirm that the perfect music suggests the perfect voice to stand on the same stage and bring listening where mediocrity has no access.

Art as a cloud waiting for thunder, for thunder waiting to sleep on a cloud, with a piano in the middle and strings spelling out outdated vowels, in the fantasy of an unlikely encounter. 

It is not Dream Pop, it is not Gothic, it is not a genre: what it is remains relegated to mystery. Films of films that never existed, painted in a workshop far from accessibility, allow the coldness contained in the album's title to tremble, to become a frenetic fragment, to evaporate pretensions and to disturb the soul. Undeterred, stuck in the magic pill of the unknown, this path of notes creates prog symphonies in a veiled way, diving into the mode of the goniometer and ink: defining, without smearing.

The grace, the feather that does not accelerate too much, the rocking of the voice between scratches and clusters of foils, introduce the thought to a location never considered before: the confusion of bewilderment before this unbearable beauty.

The strings, the synths, not only hover but point their feet, claim space and penetrate the eardrums with that sweetness that disarms and overpowers. Combined with the voice and guitar, they become lead with petals in plain sight....

Avant-garde, originality are grounds that belong to the memory (in the musical sphere certainly), but how beautiful is it to note the exception that lives in this swarm, in this beehive, in this roar of gentle strings?

Evocative harmonies, flashes of notes, syncopated bass strokes, almost invisible patterns, and then the flash, in a sweat of blood that sets off from Scotland to make a beautiful journey into our obscene ignorance. Here, then, is this record becoming the master of a perverse joy.

The sound is omnivorous, it devours the walls of the pentagram, and perfectly describes how much everything derives from classical music, from that pot that still boils the water of musical art, without hesitation. The stillness disturbs those who experience tidal waves, it disrupts them and makes them angry. The three of them, young marmots in the forest of pain, search for the leaves to make the intuitive films branch out, crossing the boundaries of the conscious, immobilising the unconscious, and then establishing the shifts of the thoughts that arise, chase each other, and bring us down.

‘Cold waves divide us’: this is the translation of the title, a deception, a truth, a clarification, a perfect ploy to focus attention on relationships, with oneself, with others, to create an emotional jungle in the Arctic pole. The cold does not melt but only chooses the best temperature to preserve and, therefore, to remember. And the album reminds us of how the ancient fragrances need a reminder, like a mental cocaine to pull up, in our foggy brains.

Crying is a gift that the soul offers to your belief that you are stronger than anything. When the songs change your mood and the flow of thoughts becomes intolerable and ungovernable, then you realise that you are faced with an enormous power, not equal to your own, and therefore you come to terms with an enormous fragility. In this case positive and capable of making you a chick in its first day of life. These are unknown information, not tracks, pills of atoms in a square sphere, not tracks, gaseous flames in which to faint from the beauty and certainly not from their toxicity, but never tracks: it would be diminishing their value if we thought that. 

Midas Fall arrive in the hemisphere of emptiness: their sublime talent (not touchable, but only usable as long as one does not enter their gaseous dumps), descends into the perimeter of perfection with the only true Masterpiece of the last ten musical years.

There is a known and an unknown that together tear apart the certain and program it for a dutiful escape.

If we really want to consider it an album, let's just say that the multitude of forms of communication here are assembled and amalgamated to leave one utterly astounded. 

We move the light, behind our backs, and enter these floral craters, one by one...

Song by Song

1 - In the Morning We'll Be Someone Else

The beginning of this masterpiece is an investigation of stylistic form, a hint of nerves, a beating in the dust: Dry, melodic, nuclear in the effect of a collapsing intimacy, it uses the atmosphere of a dream, with the slowness and drumming attempting to advance the brushes of these distant fragrances, while the vocals take the electronic part of the piece by the hand, in the chemical outpost of an ethereal manifestation of light that leaves, abandoning all comparisons with what the band had written before. Overture and torture: one immediately weeps with the shoegaze guitar lifting notes to a distant sky...

2 - I am Wrong

The rhythm enters like the spectacle of a decadent forest in the process of containment: the perspective plan is that of a race, instead, although the musical cadence suggests a tribal dance, sadness and melancholy govern these pills of ancient guitars, very close to the early eighties, when little was needed to say a lot... The coda of the song is an electric circuit of clouds and drumming that hypnotises the song form, to grant the return of Elizabeth who does justice with her vocal discipline.

Different musical genres mute here, cross over and then become spectators in the final seconds where everything becomes synthesis...

3 - Salt

Memories of Evaporate return, reminding us of their last album from five years ago: there are compositions born to be a racket inside the six-string, supported by ethereal vocals, almost demure strings and orchestration that passes from ancient to modern with ease, only to become a pill of the most profound post-rock sadness and misery...

4 - In This Avalanche

Elizabeth's lyrics are stings, the music the fabric over which she sweeps in her contemplation gentle and kind only in appearance. A music box, in the form of a loop, paves the way for a harmony that centrings the energies, then explores the sky when the voice closes in silence. Piano and synth make love to a guitar that smells of Dream Pop but is free of conditioning. And indeed she does not miss her appointment with an imaginative attitude that takes her elsewhere. A lullaby can also be a wicked but enchanting arrow...

5 - Point of Diminishing Return

The only instrumental track is instead an atypical Gregorian chorus: everything is elevated to prayer, modern, atheistic, disengaged from faith, to become a post-rock birth close to that of Leech, to give the notes a space on which to insert inserts and textures that conclude the path by inventing the rule of the sudden limit. Glacial, austere, with a sublime sadness, the song acts as a perfect bridge between the first part of the album (attentive and thoughtful) and the second (gasping with a silk jacket in her hair), in order to stun the senses and capture attention: where a splendid voice is absent, there can be music that reproduces the effect, and this happens, inexorably, on this occasion...

6 - Monsters

Once upon a time there was Mazzy Star. Low. And a plethora of bands looking for the voice to perfect the artistic path. It happens, in this case, that two parallel universes meet. In the meantime, everything becomes a harrowing episode in which guitars look at the thin horizon between post-rock and shoegaze to become the progressive form of an ancient rock. And Elizabeth's kills all reluctance, to the point of fogging the glass with sobs from the snare drum and guitars in gaseous exploration...

7 - Atrophy

Where the sky ends, Atrophy lives: the sense of death amidst the bubbling of a song that rapes the heart and a guitar footstep that advances to become an ethereal, rarefied dream, convince us that this episode is so capable of destroying defences that the soul concentrates on the heartbreaking farewell of forces in free fall. A mantra that leaves burrs in the morning of a resounding insight: drawing for real the place where it all ends...

8 - Cold Waves Divide Us

The synthesis, the prophecy, the passionate flurry of a day in which contact is made with discomfort: this track is the safe of the band's new impetus, the probe that from slowness and conceptual precision comes out widening the rhythm, the visual perimeter, and makes the loop and the delay of the guitar shine to concentrate a musical truth that is indisputable for them, which is that of never repeating a rainy day without allowing themselves multiple inputs. Here then, the musical genres present here are diverse but, given the invoice of the composition, they hide their noses, leaving only their arms to be glimpsed...

9 - Little Wooden Boxes

Nature becomes a musical note.

The breath of instruments a blink of an eye.

Words like swans in a polluted flight.

What lives on in the album's penultimate composition is a gentle and clean reinforcement of the stylistic code of this incredible journey: dilations, incursions of single chords and the slowness of the progression so close to Post-Rock without, however, entering into those parameters. The voice, with its evocative mode, explores the progression without following its shadows, and it is pure miracle of a perfect combo...

10 - Mute

The incipit is cavernous, a wreck on a nervous wave, a malaise that relies on the voice to create a short roar, not dry, but perpetually constricted by the few notes of a bewitched piano full of evil beauty, to prevent the whole from dying.

It needs no refrains, no boorish gimmicks as it is entirely similar to the typical mode of Nick Cave's old Bad Seeds: give the bass the sceptre and then invest in the fluorescent mantle of a musical apparatus to back it up. 

To arrive at the dilation, the ductility of Shoegaze that governs mystery and Post-Rock, here in the guise of a restraining magician.

Sacred, virgin, nefarious in the positive sense, the song closes this masterpiece like a drop of dew: let beauty be celebrated amidst the rose garden of endless tears...

Alex Dematteis (Vecchio Scriba - Old Writer)

Musicshockworld

Salford

7th December 2024

https://open.spotify.com/album/7HE5PoausnMjJAoco3miw2?si=PhDhAlwiQtGZEgr23y6j1Q

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