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.

There’s an old Saturday Night Live skit from the early 90s that’s a bunch of teenagers sitting around bored and trying to come up with something exciting. Figuring out they have no drugs, alcohol, or any way to procure them, one of them suggests starting a band, and they all get excited.

They start at the most obvious first step. I say having been these teenagers: Coming up with a name. They sit around trying to think of a name for the band, throwing out any number of awful ones, then the kid played by Chris Farley shouts, “I’ve got it! Pearl Jam II!”

At first they think it’s great, and then one of them goes, “Wait, but what about Pearl Jam?” and then they all lose their enthusiasm. This is supposed to be ridiculous I think, but listening to the latest album by Dreamweapon, I think it might be possible there was one smart writer in the room who was a music freak and actually knew something about loving music.

From what you can understand as a fan from interviews and reviews, pop and rock musicians are supposed to have a singular vision of what they’re trying to do and how they’re going about it. Of course we know this largely isn’t true if we read what the people making the music actually say. They talk about collaboration, craft, relationships, and communication between bandmates.

Working hard and getting a little better every day aren’t very sexy though, so I guess the journalists make up the part they want to hear. Or maybe that’s part of writing about a thing as pointless to write about as music: You spend so much time on the surface of things where things are exactly as they appear to be. That’s not much of a story.

In design, the opposite of the singular vision is what you most frequently use to guide what you’re going. We call this Best Practices. It’s a way to say, “We’ve done this before, and it works, so now that we know this, only do it unless you absolutely can’t!”

I read a thing a while ago about the so-called genius of Steve Jobs, one of the founders of Apple. Apple didn’t ever create anything new, and wasn’t the first to market with anything they’ve ever done. This writer noted they’ve done very well with a lot of things already well-established as a market, however, calling Jobs a “tweaker.” His ability was to see how something was useful and functional to the person using it, and then take that knowledge to build a better version of it. To tweak it.

Later on, this changed a bit I think. Apple these days, as ubiquitous as they are, is innovative in that they’ve made luxury goods out of computers. I wonder if this started when the early Macs and later the neXt computers he helped design had massive cost overruns. Perhaps his insistence that people would pay more for something better allowed him to observe something shrewder, that people would pay for the idea of better as readily as they would for actually functionally better. No one in the Global South has an iPhone unless they have a lot of money to blow, but it’s not because it works better. It’s a status symbol.

I digress. That ability to observe what people really want and need from something, and then to go all out in making a thing that prioritizes those things is a rare one, in writing and design!

Why not though further this idea when we’re talking about pop music? After all, we compare bands to other bands to give you an idea of what they sound like, or feel like (which is not the same thing, by the way, phenomenologically speaking). We post RIYL (Recommended If You Like) and we use terms we know aren’t descriptive to describe entire genres. We mention sub-genres to describe the idea of things when the whole point of sub-genre is about the description of sound.

When we say “black metal” to describe the feeling Jóhann Jóhannsson evokes in a horror movie soundtrack, does it make any sense if it has no blastbeats, no buzzsaw guitars, and no vocals that sound like vomiting? On the other hand, since Radiohead makes music of no discernible genre, but it definitely sounds white, educated, and fussy, it makes absolutely perfect sense to say they’re a rock band. Rock is the basic description you apply to pop music by white people that doesn’t sound like you can dance to it.

So, I’m listening to the new album by Dreamweapon, and I’m getting huge Spacemen 3 vibes. In fact, their Spacemen 3 vibe is so strong I had to go back to some Spacemen to see if I remembered them correctly. I went to the very album that Dreamweapon appears to take their name from.

It’s a live record that’s a single long song that’s essentially a stretched out, noodley amalgam of familiar riffs from their best-known albums, but done with the more accomplished, polished musicianship of their last record, Recurring. This album by the band Dreamweapon sounds as if they have encapsulated that entire progression of another band and then one-upped them.

I think this makes sense. They’ve interpreted something old, and incorporated it as knowledge. In much the way the brain takes any words you say to it and over time figures out the grammar and vocabulary of the language, and also by trying to speak it back, you hone and become expert at the very specific combinations of poses and movements you must move the muscles in your mouth, tongue and throat. In a real sense, you build the knowledge of language into your body.

What Dreamweapon has done is done this with the sound of a record, and a band. They’re a way better Spacemen 3 then the Spacemen 3 ever were, and by a long shot. It sounds like they’re actually trying to do the thing that I always want bands to do, which is to make music that sounds like you’re on drugs when you’re not. They drone, they stretch out, and they hypnotize.

The nod you’re on though isn’t just a pleasant enough sound to listen to when you’re high. There are persistent sounds that fade out so long you can no longer tell whether you’re perceiving what’s in your headphones, or your brain is just interpreting a suggested pattern. The singing, such as it’s recorded anyway, is submerged enough below delay and manipulation that it’s a lot more like a guru or a god is trying to tell you something when your mind is in an altered state.

There are squeaks and rattles and beeps that aren’t in the foreground and may or may not be part of it, I don’t know. The track Gloryhole is a great example of this. Is that rattling electronic distortion? Is it some kind of percussive thing held very close to a mic? Is is some kind of noise or recording error, or…” And I take off one cup of my headphone to see if there’s something happening around me I can’t hear with headphones on. Nope. It’s the record.

That’s not for everyone, but it’s definitely for me. It occurs to me though that I have never read a review that said, “Like Spacemen 3, but better.” Wait, that’s not true. Metal fans say shit like that all the time. People who like genre music don’t want you to have a singular vision. Or they don’t mind, really, as long as it doesn’t get in the way. Genre fans really need you to do a thing in a way that scratches their itch and they go, “Ahhhh, yes, black metal.”

The genius is to capture the thing that they didn’t even know was the most important thing while also nailing the stuff that absolutely has to be there. Dreamweapon are tweakers. Thank fucking goddess.

Stuff mentioned in this review:

Dreamweapon – Rites of Lunacy lp on Bandcamp

Spacemen 3 – Dreamweapon lp on YouTube

Jóhann Jóhannsson – Mandy OST on YouTube

I admire noise and experimental artists making compositions for a single listening following an aesthetic idea directionally.

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Gnod BNSU tape.

Loren Connors & Daniel Carter lp.

Have you ever wanted to stop time when The Knack, Van Halen, Metallica, REO Speedwagon, and The Replacements were all in the same genre?

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You know how Jesu is boring and you wish they more like Part Chimp? So does Twin Sister.

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Their amazing totally fucking pissed off singer can’t sing, but boy can she holler.

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We say amateur to mean, “inexperienced” but I usually mean it as a compliment to mean, “our minds find it difficult to accept music when we have preconceived notions it sound like something you could describe in a single stereotyped word.”

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If “genre” in music means both that it’s possible to identify all of the elements of the genre in order to create new derivative work, and also an indication that the era of evolution for music like that is over, it’s interesting that pounding AmRep dude rock is a genre.

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For the 36 people who have written to Japancakes tighten it up, and cc’d Blithe Field when they told Ry Cooder to smoke more DMT, this may be ample evidence of a creator.

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Intentionality in pop music is underrated, and this record is a reminder of why a million years ago people who wanted to change the world thought starting a band was the way to do it.

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