Live Review: Mogwai

It’s a fair bet the Opera House has never hosted a band as loud as Mogwai.

The Scottish cult heroes unleashed unholy calamity into the Concert Hall, drowning the audience in glorious guitar fuzz and symphonic rock dynamism. Their typically beautiful arrangements wandered effortlessly between the delicate and the devastating, and the depth of the set meant we experienced all facets of their career in less than two hours. The experience was transcendent, tinnitus be damned!

Opening with a softer cut from their latest synth-heavy LP Rave Tapes lulled the uninitiated into a false sense of security. The cat was well out of the bag when the group played I’m Jim Morrison, I’m Dead from the highly underrated The Hawk Is Howling, and by the time Mogwai Fear Satan had finished hollowing out skulls it almost felt like there was nowhere else to go. Surely we had earned a reprieve. Surely we could drift a while. The lumbering majesty of We’re No Here said otherwise.

There are a lot of elements at play during a Mogwai song, but hearing them live demanded a different sort of attention. It required surrender, as the music was at a volume that you felt as much as you heard it. Earplugs took the sting out of it, but obviously some detail was washed out. Some shifts in tone were so violent it felt like a defibrillator, and the part of your jaw underneath your ear vibrated. All throughout, Martin Bulloch’s machine-like drumming pummelled you in the chest with kid-hide boxing gloves.

While all this was happening, the expansive melancholic chord patterns made it not only palatable, but almost sensual. Gone was the moody intellectualism of Mogwai on record, replaced by a primal visceral engagement that was a pleasure to yield to. Mogwai is rock music at its most decadent and majestic. The Opera House was a fitting venue.