YOUNG TEAM

Par for the post rock course Young Team is an album packed with a rollercoaster ride of emotions, but being released back in 1997 they were ahead of the pack and being from Scotland quite unique in many respects. There are some truly inspired moments during Young Team where the band and their brand of melancholia is in perfect sympathy but there are times where they simply whack off a few intense riffs of aggression, interspersed with laid back picking, searching through through minor keys for sounds of sadness. The bass heavy "Like Herod" bringing out the good and the average of the band. But at least Mogwai are anything but predictable as the turn many corners, like producing stunning emotions with "Summer (priority version)" before breaking the noise barrier with a collage of aggressive sounds juxtaposed with the subtle piano wail on "With Portfolio". Mogwai, according to legend, set out to make some serious guitar music and they do just that. Their mainly instrumental music is built around the guitar, musically minimalistic, but they take the electric guitar through its paces and trash it through walls of sounds and bring it back down gracefully, yet in a dark place full of emotion and a mellow tone. Much of the narrative and samples within the music went over my head, and Young Team is not the most accessible of albums, but at this early stage Mogwai were crafting something different, original may be too strong a word as they simply tend to stretch out passages and even drone here and there to be that original, but this album is certainly entertaining, progressive, atmospheric and sometimes irritating.