Mogwai at Hammersmith Apollo

Mogwai at Hammersmith Apollo

27 October, 2008
by: Sween

The Apollo's sloping hall hosts a trilogy of terrific noise tonight, headlined by the long-standing lairds of enormous rock.

Errors, from Mogwai's Rock Action label, open up with a more melodic instrumental approach than their labelmates; but the footprint of discordance is there, as an entrenchment of cables and processors mangle pop guitars and keyboards into strangled sounds. The battered drums push disorder into frantic collapse. Gan it doon ye!

Fuck Buttons, 2008's most ubiquitous, placidly face one another across a desk laden with keyboards, laptops, kids' toys, and other unidentifiable gadgets. They innocently flick the 'on' switch; and a primitive cacophony commences. Rather than electric lights blinking softly, it's the regimented marching of a robotic nation in exodus. Atavistic thumping is welded layer upon layer upon layer into a maze of saw-cut sound, whilst inscrutable hatchet screams, tribal whoops, and/or rapturous splinters of noise break your synapses open like phosphorescent eggs.

Mogwai are Scotland's most metaphysically enlightening export since Hume; but unlike the Scottish cynic, words are not their medium. Way back in the egotastic days of BritPop, they eschewed the self-aggrandizing masquerade for something more intimate, truthful and devastating. Peel picked them up, and they've been ploughing a venerated furrow through the field of post rock ever since. Their latest album 'The Hawk Is Howling' breaks new (but familiarly explosive) ground.

With a set of the most breathtakingly blissful songs from their six albums, they play a gracious two hours that seems to pass in the blinking of a burnt-retina's eye. Somehow, they simultaneously evoke terrific sadness and terrific joy – like humble angels shuffling through Glaswegian nights, healing the misery of the toxic by reflecting that same misery in anguished, ecstatic tears.

After submerging all and sundry in this euphoric tide, they pitilessly lay all eardrums to waste with a lethal duo; the berserker leviathan of 'Like Herod''s passive-aggressive hellish epic, followed immediately by 'Batcat' – temporally opposite, but even more pugnacious for it – with its being-shallow-drowned rhythm, murderous feedback, and barbaric finale. It's like being mercilessly beaten by remorseless bone fists.

Long may they reign!

Click here to see all Live music.
Click here to see all London Rock.
Click here to see all things to do in London.

Sween