Our epic month has bled into November. We have another four long ones planned after this one, and then we will see if a handful more can take us through to December. We also have a new logo and an exciting announcement later this week…
On the closing stages of Mogwai's seminal 1997 debut, Young Team, listeners come face to face with the monumental ‘Mogwai Fear Satan’ – a track that not only serves as the album's finale but also as a totem of the post-rock genre. This sixteen-minute epic, as you’d expect, defies traditional song structure and evokes the raw power of emotional crescendos fluxing between loud and quiet. Mogwai, hailing from Glasgow, would go on to play with the extremes of sound to affect the listener's physical and emotional state throughout their career, but they may not have ever beaten this first time. It is a song that draws a thin line across the history of music between a band like Pixies and the likes of Animal Collective. Whereas the former typified that loud-quiet dynamic shift throughout their career, the latter spent the first decade of the 21st Century taking fans on a journey through sound that exemplifies their ability to transform minimalistic melodies into a gripping auditory experience. Mogwai do both on ‘…Fear Satan’ submerges the audience in a state of blissful shock.
In this long-form piece, the band employs a gentle, repeating motif that is embellished and warped over time, culminating in a cacophony that strips the listener of any guard they may have had left. It's a piece that commands reflection, not just on the track itself, but on the entirety of the album it concludes. The band's ethos, rooted in exploration and dynamic storytelling, is encapsulated beautifully within this song.
The song's title, much like many of Mogwai's compositions, is intriguingly mundane, with reports suggesting it was named after Dominic Aitchison, the band's bassist, and his Catholic upbringing. Starting with a three-chord melody, it entwines the listener within a soundscape of bass, guitar, drums, and the signature Mogwai dynamic shifts. Even without co-founder John Cummings, who left in 2015, the track remains a live staple, a testament to his influence and the enduring nature of the band's early work. According to setlist.fm, it is their most played song live.
The track opens with a trio of chords strummed by Stuart Braithwaite and Cummings on the guitar. This melody forms the backbone of the piece and is soon complemented by Aitchison's bass and the increasingly intense drum rhythms courtesy of Martin Bulloch, which subtly build up in the mix. This particular guitar riff recurs persistently throughout the composition, sometimes cloaked in heavy distortion, adding to the track's intense and atmospheric quality.
The inclusion of a haunting flute melody, played by a then thirteen-year-old Shona Brown, sets a tranquil yet eerie scene atop the tribal drums. With the flute, so often an instrument that school girls progress to after the recorder, there is a layer of innocence and purity in the mix, contrasting with the often crushing weight of the guitars and drums. The sixteen-minute studio runtime is trimmed to around eleven minutes live, yet the essence of the track remains untarnished – still vast, still imposing.
When the album came out, the band had mixed feelings about the record. Stuart Braithwaite said that his original take on their debut was;
…a total disaster. We were young and naïve and had too little time. We should have said: “No, the record isn't done until six months later”. Instead, we sat and mixed whole nights and felt bad. We didn't talk to each other. When the album was released, we just wanted to forget everything.
However, shortly after, Braithwaite has said:
Listening back, I’m really proud of it. At the time we were really unhappy with it. It’s the least enjoyable record we ever made, we really weren’t getting on that well, which is really unlike us because we’re amazingly good friends and were beforehand. I think we put us under a lot of pressure. There was a deadline to finish it, which now looking back, I think, “Why was there a deadline when we’d already released a record?”. We probably just imposed it ourselves. It was all a bit stressful, [and at the time] we were disappointed with it.
Such a heavyweight, closing leviathan has had an indelible blueprint on not just Mogwai’s trajectory but also on all those that have dabbled in the dynamics of post-rock and others that only have a slither of overlapping Venn Diagram with it. In the years following Young Team, Mogwai continued to refine the quiet-loud dynamic showcased in ‘Mogwai Fear Satan,’ but arguably none of their subsequent works would utilise it with quite the same rawness or on such an epic scale.
The song’s expansive soundscapes and visceral energy became a yardstick for their live performances, often serving as the set’s climax. Its enduring presence in their live repertoire underscores its significance to the band and its fans, illustrating how a single track can become the heart of a musical identity.
The song's influence extends to bands like Explosions in the Sky, Godspeed You! Black Emperor and Sigur Rós have all, in various ways, embraced the template of crafting lengthy, cinematic pieces that eschew traditional rock song formats for something more sprawling and emotionally stirring. “…Fear Satan” is a track that does what all great album closers should do: it captures you before it lets you go.
The Run Out Grooves Infinite Loops
Waited 10 minutes for that flute to show up, was not disappointed.