Covid was a bizarre departure from normality for the music industry, a two-year thunderclap when the treadmill stopped and artists were confronted with the knotty question of how to fill all the spare hours that suddenly opened up.
Taylor Swift went indie; Elton John collaborated with Britney Spears; Chris Martin started taking requests in his attic. But of all the pandemic curveballs none was more eye-opening than the alternative stalwarts Mogwai achieving their first UK number one, which they did in February 2021 with their 10th LP, As the Love Continues.
The album had coalesced in the eerie bliss of lockdown, the individual musicians recording alone and then assembling the project remotely. That experience of standing still, watching the world pass by like clouds drifting through on a warm, breezy day seemed to awaken something in the Glasgow band. Having toured like Trojans for years, suddenly there was nothing to do. Amid the silence, they made the most glorious noise of their career.
Four years or so later, lockdown is a fading memory, a slippery shadow at the back of our minds. Like the rest of us, Mogwai have gone back to the day job and returned to the road. (They were a highlight of the first In the Meadows festival, in Dublin, last year.)
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They’ve had personal challenges, too: they recorded The Bad Fire, their grippingly introspective 11th long-player, in the shadow of serious health issues for the daughter of Barry Burns, the band’s keyboardist. (She has made a complete recovery.) In other words, the quiet of lockdown had been replaced by the roiling storm clouds of everyday life – and the shift is detectable across a thoroughly solid project that moves on from the blissed-out vibes of As the Love Continues to somewhere more fraught (”bad fire” being a “working-class Glaswegian name for hell”).
Mogwai’s great gift – but also their curse, perhaps – is that they found their groove early on and have never strayed far from the formula. Their template is instrumental indie rock – sometimes grainy and cinematic, often ear-shreddingly loud, only rarely accompanied by vocals. In the 1990s it was given the handle “postrock”, a label that musicians hated but one that has stuck stubbornly ever since.
“Postrock” is a play on prog rock, and the parallels between Mogwai and peers such as Godspeed You! Black Emperor and the 1970s proggers Pink Floyd and King Crimson are obvious. In both cases the musicians take their time, songs not so much pinging from A to B as unspooling in great, sludgy avalanches of noise.
But where prog championed musical chops and noodling for noodling’s sake, postrock takes its values from alternative rock. Virtuosity, where it is present, is not to be acknowledged. The most important quality is a sort of gruff authenticity, which Mogwai have always possessed in oodles.
The downside is that if you have followed Mogwai through the decades, one record tends to flow into the next. On every album there’s the tune that sounds a bit like a gnarlier version of My Bloody Valentine, the Irish progenitors of maximalist noise. There will be another one that riffs (literally) on the spindly effervescence of the postrock father figure Slint. And there’ll be a track where the band’s unofficial leader, Stuart Braithwaite, mumbles into the mic as though he awoke that morning determined to lay some actual vocals but, now the moment has arrived, has lost the will to do so.
In that sense The Bad Fire is nothing Mogwai fans haven’t already heard. Yet, in a world full of inconsistency, that is no bad thing. Their gentler side is to the fore on Hi Chaos, where a balmy melody floats atop shuffling drums, while they explode into shoegaze fuzz on the roaring Lion Rumpus.
The best Mogwai songs simultaneously grab you by the scruff and spear your heart, and there is at least one such moment on The Bad Fire: the single Fanzine Made of Flesh, which pairs a chugging Krautrock tempo with a video shot in the most liminal place in the known universe, the top floor of Stephen’s Green Shopping Centre, Dublin. A realm of spooky otherness, it’s the perfect backdrop for a band who never much change but continue to surprise us by turning the familiar into something magical and mysterious.
