April 30, 1998
Young Team opens with an extraordinarily bold statement of purpose. Over a soft, trance-inducing organ, a sampled voice declares haltingly: "Music is bigger than words and wider than pictures … if someone said that Mogwai were the stars, I would not object. If the stars had a sound, it would sound like this."
What would the stars sound like? The delicate shimmering of celestial light, the deep murmur of vast distances, the shrieking implosions of supernovas - could an earthbound band really channel these cosmic sounds? The answer, in Mogwai, is a resounding yes.
This Scottish group's debut album is a majestic collection of otherworldly instrumentals. But it is more than a collection - composed with a sense of drama bordering on classical, the songs work as an organic whole, shifting into each other with a grand vision that is as expansive as it is passionate. Make no mistake: words would only get in the way of the transcendent emotional impact of the opening "Yes! I am a Long Way From Home." Carefully placed samples, precisely interlocking waves of hypnotic organ melt into cacophony and back again as contemporary song structure is rejected.
Their influences are immediately apparent, but the result is unique. Mogwai take their time, building on the minimalist repetition and stammering piano of Philip Glass, adding teetering walls of feedback a la Sonic Youth, the sinewy, heavily textured guitars of My Bloody Valentine and the organ drones of Stereolab. The result is frighteningly beautiful - this, my friends, is the music of the spheres.
Young Team is seductive, enticing you to lose yourself in the soundscapes of gentle, rolling drums and sudden shards of white noise. The pinnacle is the closing track, the ethereal 16-minute epic "Mogwai Fear Satan." Pulling all that came before into an angelic choir of buzzing, trembling guitars and laced with haunting flute, it sounds like nothing less than the voice of God.
- Jared O'Connor
Music of the spheres