I love Mogwai’s album titles -- how can you not? They promise not just action, but ROCK action. It’s a reminder once again that Mogwai for all their noise and drama also have a sense of humor about them, which makes the pyrotechnics of the actual record a little less self-serious. In a way the title also brings us back to the contested question of what it means to call something post-rock -- we’re promised some rock action, so can we get past the problem of what rock means in the first place?
On one level, this is noticeably different from the first two albums -- it’s much shorter, coming in at thirty-eight minutes and the longest song doesn’t even break ten minutes. The opening track. “Sine Wave,” contrasts nicely with the semantics of the album title, all symmetrical geometry versus the straightforward bluntness of ROCK ACTION. The track itself has some fuzz and hiss to it in the production and a gorgeous slow build as the textures gradually thicken over the opening two minutes. The plucked melody and the drums pulse in counterposing patterns and there’s a vocoder buzzing away in the mix here too. What’s immediately noticeable about the band is the sheer joy in fucking with your expectations -- the established quiet/LOUD/quiet dynamics that people were expecting and this is what you get instead. In the context of this project as a whole, what’s interesting is that Mogwai seem poised here between the more traditional band structures of Explosions In The Sky -- guys with guitars -- and the orchestration and wide array of instruments perfected by Godspeed You! Mogwai are, in a sense, a pretty straightforward band but the addition of synths, extra instruments and, as the album unfolds, even new languages show them on the cusp of Becoming something else. I think what has helped Mogwait last over 25 years of making music together is exactly this sense of musical restlessness, the endless re-expression of the drive to get out to somewhere new.
After Sine Wave the album moves on to “Take Me Somewhere Nice” -- easily one of Mogwai’s most well-known songs and one which has gotten countless listeners into the band. It starts off relatively straightforward, with a beautiful string section as background to a guitar line and slow drum build. Lyrics arrive after a couple of minutes -- and Mogwai have always been somewhat prone to more introspective, serious, and even mournful lyrics in contrast to the excitement and restlessness of the music. “Ghosts in the photograph, never lied to me” sings Stuart Braithwaite in a mournful whisper. Yet at the same time, the very next lines undercut this: “I'd be all of that/A false memory/Would be everything.” There is something uncomfortable in the double meanings here -- the psst image seems to be truthful, the photographs or memories of what is no longer present with us have never lied, but the memories are false. Listening to the song made me think of Sontag’s essay “On Photography” and her warning that ‘to photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed. It means putting oneself into a certain relation to the world — that feels like knowledge, and therefore, like power.” To photograph something, or someone is not just to hold on to them but to try and maintain a level of control — it’s what Sontag calls the “selective transparency of the image.” The lyrics echo something Fredric Jameson writes in Marxism and Form, that in the philosophy of Ernst Bloch, the true antithesis of hope is not fear, but memory -- that which casts the subject back into itself. How can there be anything new if all we allow ourselves are false memories -- of images that hold a single moment perpetually in stasis for us? Then comes some of Mogwai’s most famous lyrics: “What would you do? If you saw spaceships, over Glasgow/Would you fear them?/Every aircraft/Every camera/Is a wish that/wasn't granted”
What would you do if something radically different broke into day-to-day consciousness? Would there be a break, a suspension of what we laughingly refer to as normal? Sometimes the New creeps in almost unnoticed, and every so often you look outside the window and there are spaceships in the sky -- would you fear them? The final section of the lines I think adds a great deal of interesting ambiguity here too: “every aircraft and camera, a wish that wasn’t granted.” For me, the line reads as sardonic -- the hyper-militarised, carceral world in which we exist is -- so we are endlessly told -- the best one available. There is no alternative. I think reading the song hauntologically makes sense of the cryptic lines about broken promises in the context of the flashes of memories of the image mentioned earlier. The promise of the past -- the idea that things might be different in the future is both a truthful one, and a false memory, for look at the world that we have. Is this it? Haven’t the promises of modernism, of progress, all been broken? The following track is almost a coda, a short (very short) piano-led piece called “O, I Sleep.” It adds a further layer of emotional complexity as Braithwaite sings that
I wanted to see
If fire would burn me
I thought I would know
If four walls could hold me
When taken with the previous song’s lyrics there is a through line here of a desperate searching for a way out that can almost bleed into the annihilationist. From there, the album introduces Gruff Rhys, frontman of Super Furry Animals who sings “Dial” -- or, in English, Revenge. The melody and instrumentation are, by the band’s standards, relatively light, and I think using Rhys’ vocals as another kind of instrument makes the song come together in an interesting way. Lyrically it’s about just what the title suggests but there's such a deep meloncholia at work here that you would never mistake it for a straightforward power fantasy. As Rhys sings (I’ve translated from the Welsh) “And every time I pick up the phone/ It says 'Revenge'/ Indecent revenge/Not the fearful power of /Gold, frankincense and myrrh.” As a result, it’s well within the tradition of the anti-love song that Mogwai are so adept at constructing, such as “R U Still In 2 it” from their first album. In this case, Rhys and Mogwai manage to marry the lyrics with a musical style that suits the introspective and bleak themes. In a way, it is the band writing its own version of a pop single, but this is immediately undercut by the very next track -- a slice of classic Mogwai, the phenomenally titled “You Don’t Know Jesus”
Starting with some more excellent drum work and the classic Mogwai guitar sound, the build in the opening couple of minutes is superb, with a sinister synth cutting through the mix to add a real sense of excitement. The feedback and fuzz are layered in expertly so by three minutes in the guitars are all but screaming at you -- it doesn’t quite have the same seismic impact as something like “Mogwai Fear Satan” or “Like Herod” but that doesn’t really matter when the technique and the sound is this GOOD. It’s the feeling of listening to experts be what they are -- phenomenal musicians. By six minutes the noise dies away a little before building back up, held together by the drumming which is the track’s pulse, and when the music eventually fades out, and “Robot Chant” starts, all fuzz and feedback it feels like you are hearing the echo of “You Don’t Know Jesus” from the other side as it were. The final long track on the album is “Two Rights Make One Wrong” (another sly joke and a great song title) that reintroduces what sounds like voices right in the back of the mix, almost hidden behind the jangly clean guitar work and (again) some genuinely phenomenal drumming. On a level of emotion, the build is expectant, a mood reinforced when the organ starts. The strings drop in after four minutes, with some electronic bleeps and bloops backing up some vocoded vocals. It is calm, and joyful, not striving towards something or haunted by the past as earlier songs have been, but rather perfectly present.
At around six minutes the track almost feels like it’s going to glitch out -- a good reminder that those moments of simply being are never entirely outside of the flow of time -- but it is instead a well-constructed sonic move towards an ending. Things drop out, just as they entered at the beginning, leaving just a simple guitar melody -- then, right at the end, there are ethereal voices layered and floating through the mix before cutting short in a moment of glitch. What’s so interesting about Mogwai -- and this album in particular -- is the consistent effort to reckon with haunting, to push against the same familiarity that led Sigur Ros into emotionalism. There is -- as always -- immense technique on show, but never routine. What you hear is the sound of searching -- for a way out, for a truth beyond the honest lies of the images of the past, and for something that would allow us to respond with hope when and if spaceships appear in the skies above Glasgow