Mar 4, 2009 (15 years ago) Enmore Theatre Enmore, New South Wales, Australia
Dream Pop, Electronic, Electronica, Experimental, Indie, Indie Rock, Instrumental, Post-Rock, Alternative, British, Soundtrack, UK, Compositional Ambient, Instrumental Post-Rock, Scottish, British Post-Rock, Cosmic Post-Rock, and Scottish Rock.
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Mogwai, Enmore Theatre, 4 March, 2009
Just when you thought you had made it through the summer music season with your hearing intact, Mogwai returns.
The Hawk is Howling is the latest studio album from Glasgow’s post-rock heroes Mogwai and courtesy of the good people at the Golden Plains Festival they make their fourth visit Down Under.
A large portion of the Enmore crowd were well and truly believers. Mogwai are the Pringles of live music – you just can’t stop at seeing them once. Mogwai is an aural and physical assault on your senses done strictly with the weapon of pure music. You don’t have the normal reprieves or distractions. There are no tunes to hum, lyrics to sing along with, fancy haircuts to swoon over, banter to chuckle at or skinny-jeaned gyrations to sigh over – you are just enveloped by the wondrous noise created by five unassuming Glaswegians, a shitload of speakers and retina searing illumination. To try and describe them to the uninitiated is an almost fruitless task – there’s no possible way to convey the force of the band with mere words. You could start by loosely describing their songs as a perilous and fractious mix of ‘light’ and ‘dark’. Maybe you could try and encapsulate their dynamic use of ‘loud’ and ‘soft’ – well for the moments where the ‘soft’ could be properly experienced, which isn’t very often as people seem to think that any quiet part is an invitation to holler like they are at a mid-western American rodeo – but nothing could ever express or describe moments like the brute blast of music in the song ‘Like Herod’ that is so potent it caused the capacity crowd to physically recoil as one. The sounds created can transport you through many shades of mood ranging from meditative contemplation to a gripping, jolting intensity of feeling, bordering on alarm, sometimes even within the one song. ‘Cody’, one of the rare Mogwai songs with lyrics, could even be described as romantic and caused many a lingering gaze and interlocked hands among the evening’s attached attendees. The crowd’s rabid reaction after their final song ensured a return and the last (non) word of the night was the majestically sprawling ‘Mogwai Fear Satan’. After a two hour brilliant barrage, the end still came far too soon.
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