na: mogwai, optimo, black angels

Those appendages are really creepy.

Three excellent new releases hit the site today in completely different genres.

Mogwai – Young Team

One of crescendocore’s finest—and first—moments, Mogwai’s Young Team is a blinding statement of intent from a band equally as in love with explosions of feedback as they are with plaintive solo piano. I reviewed the album for eMusic, writing:

Young Team is often called Mogwai’s finest moment, though guitarist Stuart Braithwaite once complained that when it was recorded, the group was “young and naïve and had too little time.” The truth is that it’s both. Far from the disaster that Braithwaite believed it to be, Young Team benefits from youthful indiscretion. There is raw energy flowing through it, even though Mogwai clearly were already working within the soft-loud/crescendocore template that would define them.

This recklessness is perfectly captured by Arab Strap’s Aidan Moffat on the album’s only true vocal cut, “R U Still in 2 It?” He never sings, just speaks, “We should go into town and spend some money,” and goes on to offer mundane options for entertainment. A movie, a drink. But then the group comes in and reminds you what that disaffected cool is hiding: “Will you still miss me, when I’m gone?” At this point, Mogwai were still romantics—no matter how much demonic feedback they couched their work within. They were also never better.

The Black Angels - Directions to See a Ghost

Back on the site after it popped up a few days early by accident. Corey DuBrowa sez:

So you’ve gone and named your band after a Velvet Underground song so atonal and anti-rock (“The Black Angel’s Death Song”) that it continues to peel paint from the walls 40 years after its release. Your sound represents a sonic soup squeezed from the pulp of the banshee-wail psychedelia of Roky Erickson’s Thirteenth Floor Elevators, the Doors’ most drone-tastic interludes and the mock-gospel of Spiritualized. And your live show resembles nothing less than a Pink Floyd UFO Club gig circa 1967, period-perfect in its acid-streaked details right down to the ectoplasmic slide show beamed over a stage otherwise dark enough to induce drowsiness among band members and stage crew alike. (Oh, and your band’s “Eddie the Head”-like icon is a high-contrast black/white image of Nico, pre-damage). What could possibly be next?

If it’s possible to assemble all the iconic rock ‘n roll talismans in a single place, Austin’s Black Angels have gathered the clouds around them, and on the band’s sophomore LP, unleash them on an unsuspecting world like the Ghostbusters dumping the contents of their spectral garbage can into a raging sea. Whether embodied in the spirit of the album’s perfect sonic bookends — the creeping-dread opener “You on the Run” and its 16-minute-plus mirror, “Snake in the Grass” — or the many essays-on-a-theme that dot the barren landscape in between (“Never Ever” — vocalist Alex Maas’ freak-flag festival of doom, complete with weird noises that echo the Elevators’ legendary “electric jug” — is particularly effective), Directions to See a Ghost keeps it real (creepy) by harnessing the group’s black-light Warlock Rock in all the right, evil ways.

Subculture and Optimo – 20 Years Underground

Yeah. It’s kind of hard to overstate how much up-my-alley this compilation is. It starts with Carl Craig goes through its Detroit techno paces with the Martian and Derrick May, hits Henrik Schwarz, then goes on to include Alec Empire, Luke Vibert, Baby Oliver, Lindstrom and Prins Thomas and Boutade on the second half. I haven’t listened to this two-disc mix all the way through yet, but this is massive. Really, really looking forward to it.

Cheers to Alex for pointing that one out to me, as I might’ve accidentally flipped by it on the New Releases page.