This cascaded across my thoughts as the second song on the latest Mogwai record came on, but this is probably generally applicable to virtually any band or record. Especially ones where I have a disproportionate attachment to a particular album or period that is either long gone, or an outlier in their catalog.

This record is boring. It’s not good at all. This is what I think to myself, wondering how it is that the multiple special vinyl editions of it have all sold out before the record’s even released when anyone who bought it could have listened to it on the Bandcamp page, as I did. Why would hundreds or thousands of Mogwai fans buy it when it’s about a million light years from what’s good about Mogwai?

Leaving aside that people buy records for all kinds of stupid reasons, as a cascade of synth drenched the headphones and I could hear little sparkles of multicolored sound, I had a moment.

While the vinyl market seems to be doing a repeat of what it did near the peak of the cd boom, this is actually paramusical. Back then, in England especially, but labels like Matador loved this kind of shit too, they would release multiple versions of the same single, each with different b sides. Usually it was just two separate cds or two separate 7 inches. I believe the Flaming Lips might be the canonical example if you were making a wiki page of evidence of pre-mobile-app methods companies deployed to manipulate the devoted with emotional appeal: I recall different songs on the multiple cd and vinyl single releases in both the US and England from multiple singles from their great 1995 album Clouds Taste Metallic.

Silly bullshit that collectors markets love to do, which is to create many versions of the same thing and allow the enthusiast end of the market purchase more expensive versions or more copies of the same old thing, is not the point I wish to make, but I note it for a reason. I just put on Mogwai’s 2001 album Rock Action, and by the second song, Take Me Somewhere Nice, I’m greeted with a sound that’s quite compatible with what I heard on the latest lp before I turned it off. This is following a gloomy and eerie beginning with the song Sine Wave, which is all minor keys and dissonance and building to a swell of crackling noise, with a tension that isn’t ever released.

My memory of this album is that there are dark songs, and punishing songs, and heavy songs. I don’t remember the songs that I don’t actually like, which is more than half of them, including all of the songs with vocals. I keep skipping boring songs and even when I get to one that’s good, the more-like-their-old-stuff You Don’t Know Jesus, I skip that one because it’s just not enough. Now I need something to get over how much I’m not enjoying Mogwai.

Getting to the arguable highlight of the record, 2 Rights Make 1 Wrong, I realize this song hints at the sound they’ll expand to an album’s length for their 2003 lp. It’s melodic, wistful, and layered. Despite a single melodic theme, a sort of canon I think, there’s a progression of voices, and, also like a canon, what feels emotionally like a story.

And here’s where I stop again. That pretty good 2003 lp Happy Songs For Happy People is the last time I enjoyed any new Mogwai, not counting the release of their radio sessions from the late 90s a couple years later. That record nearly dispensed entirely with their trademark loud-quiet-loud dynamic of their defining early songs like Like Herod, or My Father My King.

If there’s any hint in their early work to predict their later work is probably better. Mogwai Fear Satan’s dynamic, more of a quiet quiet QUIET QUIET loud LOUD LOUDLOUDLOUD is actually a more like their later albums in two ways: it’s more or less unambiguous dramatic appeal, and that progression of voices and layers.

And it’s a fine song, to be sure. What I can really sink my teeth into though is the jagged and unpredictable Mogwai, the one that suddenly goes supernova, like Ithica, or the piano track on Young Team where a note held emerges from its own smoke as flanging, delay, and rapid fluttering between the left and right stereo channels. Even Like Herod is an anti-anthem, with an eerie subsonic melody made with the bass and two noodling low guitars.

Thinking about my disappointment with Mogwai, it seems that what I have liked about this poor band for their entire career is something that is not primary to their work, and they appear to have built away from. I can tell you though that I bought their first cd on import for way too much money. At that time, you could even do things like listen to an album at HMV as much as you wanted, or heck, even buy it, make a dub of it, and take it back for a full refund as long as the disc and insert were in good condition.

(again, to HMV. I doubt any other record store had such a policy, but this was the heady 90s when the record industry peaked in sales. Because this store just reshrinkwrapped cds they opened for customers to listen to, there was no way to tell whether a cd had been opened at the listening station by a clerk, or by a customer at home who’d also puchased a TDK XLII90 at the same time)

I didn’t though. I didn’t love the record, but I bought it from my indie store that had it before it was available in the US, and I listened to it many times. Like Herod blew up and then expanded to fill the void it created with the broken pieces, and I puzzled over the tracks that at first seemed like studio experiments by serious musicians who like to fuck around and have a pint.

For seconds at a time, I felt transcendence. I found little bits and pieces of the kind of sound that makes me do things I don’t understand. Such as believing for 25 years that I was a fan of a band that really was some other band.

That band’s been putting out albums and movie soundtracks for a couple of decades now, and they have found their people and their people have found them. I’m very happy for Mogwai to have done this, because making very loud sounds that occasionally collapse in on themselves and destroy everything in the vicinity isn’t what anyone can choose for a career in music I’m sure. Probably especially in Glasgow.

That emotional appeal that was made to me kept me buying records until 2009 or so. I can even tell you that I spent $32 to see them in 2005, such is the disappointment I’ve apparently held on to, looking for this thing that will not be found. The argument made by the special edition of a record I totally get, since I am able and willing to spend decades creating my own idea of a band and searching ever more desperately for it.

But now that I know that, I’m pleased that I can go back over their discography and see if I don’t enjoy what I enjoy that much more now, now that being unreasonably let down isn’t part of the equation.