Labels: Chemikal Underground
Review by: Dan Baker
Mogwai’s first full length, “Young Team’, was and still is one of my favourite records of all time. So obviously I was expecting a lot from this release on the ever so trendy Scottish label Chemikal Underground (shame all the other bands suck).
Come on die young, a Glaswegian gang phrase, signifies a big change in Mogwai’s direction, and at first I was cynical about it. Young Team was effect laden, with most songs resorting to the quiet/loud concept and had some pretty melodies and some depressing ones too. C.O.D.Y, by contrast, is a lot slower, a lot quieter and a hell of a lot more depressing, bringing to mind a band they often namedropped before but which never mad much sense to me, Slint. One of the only reasons you can tell so clearly it is the same old Mogwai is that there isn’t any singing.
This change has worked well in a lot of the songs on the album. “Kappa’ and “May nothing but happiness come through your door’ do great jobs of slowly building up as though they are about to get very heavy and then quietly fade away. And the moody powerful ten-minute long “ex cowboy’ is pretty incredible. But in a 12 track, 67-minute album, there needs to be some variation, something that is greatly missing from this album. All the songs are the same tempo, all have the same flat production, and well, a few sound the same. However, it is still a very good album with very good emotive passionate songs. They also deserve some credit for the naming of the songs, which go beyond the pretentious to the nonsensical with “year 2000 non-compliant cardia’, “oh! How the dogs stack up’ and my personal favourite, “punk rock/puff daddy/ANtICHRISt’.
Mogwai have changed a great deal, but they still rock, they are just more of a normal stone as to the boulder they once were. My advice to anyone who has never heard them is to buy Young Team first, then get this one.