.Mogwai Remains Devoid of Words

Instrumental-rock pioneers make both cuddly creations and menacing music.

Not all musicians must be poets. So says John Cummings, guitarist
for the oft-celebrated and endlessly creative Scottish rock band
Mogwai, which generally does not perform songs with lyrics or
vocals.

“It’s not that we don’t have a lot to say,” Cummings said during a
phone interview while on the road stateside. “We’ve got a lot to say in
a verbal way. I mean, a couple of us are quite chatty when we get going
with discussions about intellectual thoughts and feelings and such
things. But that doesn’t really manifest itself in the music we make
and give back to the people.”

Just because you’re working in the realm of pop or rock music,
Cummings argued, you shouldn’t feel obliged to make significant
contributions to the literary body. “That doesn’t seem really
justified to me. If you don’t mean it, it seems a little
dishonest.”

Mogwai is on its way to San Francisco, where it will play Sunday,
May 17, at the Grand Ballroom, with opening act Dead Meadow.

Even without words, Mogwai’s dramatic instrumentals speak
significantly. On the band’s latest full-length CD, The Hawk Is
Howling
, the opening track, “I’m Jim Morrison, I’m Dead” begins
with a stark, Satie-like piano figure that gives way to a hypnotic
blizzard of guitar feedback, through which delicate shards of melody
insist on piercing. It’s lovely and ominous at the same time, and some
listeners may be reminded of the spacious tone poems of Sigur
Rós.

That’s followed by the full-throttle and heavier-than-thou guitar
workout “Batcat.” Then there’s “Danphe and the Brain,” in which a
monstrous iceberg of guitars shifts inexorably, like tectonic plates,
with the slow, patient chord changes bringing to mind the minimalism of
composer Philip Glass. Or there’s “Local Authority,” a soothing
meditative melody of guitar and piano that could have come from Tom
Verlaine’s more mellow records, or David Bowie’s collaborations with
Brian Eno on Low and Heroes. The album’s masterpiece,
“The Sun Smells Too Loud” combines elements of throbbing electronica,
catchy guitar rock, shimmering background textures and spacey
organ.

Formed in the mid-1990s in Glasgow, Mogwai originally came together
as vehicle for longtime friends and guitarists Stuart Braithwaite and
Dominic Aitchison (in the company of drummer Martin Bulloch) to explore
all of the textures afforded by the six electrified strings.

Soon after, Cummings joined the group, adding a third guitar to the
mix. These days, the band, which also includes Barry Burns, adds a
variety of keyboards to the jumble of drums and wires.

Since the beginning, Mogwai’s members have strived to create what
they had heretofore only heard in their heads, Cummings said. “It was
definitely designed to play music that, from our perspective, no one
else was playing. It just didn’t seem like a lot of people in Glasgow
or anywhere else were interested in that sort of music, or even what
we were doing after we started. At first.”

However, in 2008, a great many bands play rock music that is devoid
of words, or close to it, and many of them are lumped (perhaps
unfairly) into the category known as “post rock.” Among them are such
acts as Pelican, Don Caballero, Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Explosions
in the Sky, Tortoise, Mono and the legendary Savage Republic.

Cummings said he and his bandmates are well aware that other groups
are mining a similar vein in music, but he doesn’t consider Mogwai to
be a pioneer. “It does seem like there is a justification for people
saying certain bands are similar to us. It’s not like we really
invented the instrumental-rock style, and not many of them sound all
that much like we do. Everybody does their own thing, and most do it
well.”

In case you were wondering, Mogwai was named for those furry little
creatures in the movie Gremlins, and the name also happens to be
a transliteration of a Cantonese word that means evil spirit or demon.
Like those bug-eyed darlings in the 1984 movie, the band’s music can be
cuddly or menacing, depending on its mood.

Because of the expansive, cinematic quality of Mogwai’s music, it
was something of a no-brainer when the band begun working in movies.
Between the release of the band’s last “proper” album and the making of
The Hawk Is Howling, Mogwai collaborated on the score for Darren
Aronofsky’s The Fountain with composer Clint Mansell, and the
group composed and recorded the soundtrack for the documentary
Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait, about the French soccer star
Zinedine Zidane.

And despite what Cummings says, the guys in Mogwai are able to
indulge their collective poetic muse through the titling of their
songs. The methods by which they arrive at those titles are never the
same, he added.

“Usually, it’s a matter of necessity. Some are purely musings; some
are absurdities. We all usually have some titles in mind, but it
usually ends up being some fucking rubbish that we ended up talking
about at the time. They’re like pots of gold at the end of the
rainbow.”

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