Alternative Weekend: Mogwai

In case you've never heard it before, #alternativeweekend is a cool hashtag where you'll find much nonmainstream cool music. It was initiated by @slobberchops.

For today edition, I will post about the Scottish band: Mogwai.

Mogwai formed in 1995 in Glasgow. Their music mostly rocks guitar-based instrumental pieces that feature heavy use of distortion and effects.

I went to their concert some years ago at a small venue in Bandung, Indonesia. They were promoting the album "Hardcore Will Never Die, But You Will". It was a really intimate concert, only hundreds of people attended the show. The sounds were so loud as hell, but that was exactly what you're expecting for a Mogwai concert. I should have brought my earplug back then.

I grew up listening to heavy Seattle Sound and the likes of Fugazi, MC5, My Bloody Valentine, Sonic Youth, Pixies, and The Cure. So the heavy distortion and weird effects that Mogwai heavily used was really tempting to my ears.

Some have said that the music they were playing fall into post-rock genre, some even said that they playing shoegaze. Screw that classification. For me, Mogwai is instrumental rock music, period. Instrumental rock music with many layers with good built-up. They will start the song with soft and low but slowly through the middle, we will find so many elements keep adding up, the song becomes thicker, and when the climax came they will give you an intense pleasure of white noise.

Okay, I guess enough for me to rambling about this great band. Here are three songs by Mogwai (two of the videos taken from the music documentary by Vincent Moon)

Rano Pano

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Fear Satan

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I'm Jim Morrison, I'm dead

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There you go. If you enjoying this kind of post, please follow me. I'll try my best to keep posting alternative weekend every Saturday :)