To live past the end of your relevance is a perilous thing. The noisy, crescendoing, and purely instrumental post-rock Mogwai peddled in the nineties with albums like Mogwai Young Team (1997) and Come On Die Young (1999) just doesn’t inspire the awe it used to. People like songs that don’t last a half hour and albums that don’t last an afternoon. People like music that doesn’t make everything cosmic and mystical.
Mogwai knows this. Over the past fifteen years, they’ve sanded down their sound. They’ve cut down track lengths and shed the noise. They’ve coated their albums in a glossy lacquer of synths and pianos. They’ve even added lyrics. In their most recent release, The Bad Fire, Mogwai continues this trajectory.
The opening track “God Gets You Back,” with its eerie synth lines and vocoded vocals, is like a closing theme on an original series destined to be canceled. In other vocal tracks, like “Fanzine Made of Flesh” or “18 Volcanoes” the vocoder returns or reverb is applied. The effect is cheap and fails to mask the frontman’s limited vocal range.
In “Hi Chaos” and “If You Find This World Bad, You Should See Some of The Others,” we get bite-sized and formulaic post-rock. In both, a drifting, moody guitar is overlaid with drums and synths until a crescendo is reached. In “Pale Vegan Hip Pain,” that moody guitar returns, but it goes nowhere.
The album is at its best in its final tracks, when Mogwai drops their post-rock formula and embraces their new sound. “Lion Rumpus” is a solid three minutes of driving drums and crunchy guitar. The vocoder returns, but the underlying voice is so distorted it just sounds like an excited synth zipping around. The piano and electronic percussion on “Hammer Room” build a sready groove that follows the listener through the entire track. In the final track, “Fact Boy,” Mogwai demonstrates the range of their new electronic instruments: below the piercing main synth, others warble and chime. The track closes with a muffled shuffling like upstairs neighbors moving furniture and a windy ambience, providing a provocative close to an otherwise uninspiring album.
Mogwai doesn’t sound their best on this album, but they haven’t surrendered yet. When they fully commit to their new sound, they can still surprise and excite. On The Bad Fire, Mogwai pulls out new toys but seems too afraid to play with them. In coming years, I hope they ditch the last of their post-rock stuffiness and just have some fun.
