Mogav’s ‘upbeat’ returns after difficult years

A word crop remains during our interview with Glasgow Four-Pix Mogwai-and the term is “weird”.

It was “psychidely strange” when his last album, as The Love continues, unexpectedly went to number one in 2021.

Frontman Stuart Brathwaite says that this achievement was made “even strange” during the epidemic, so we could not even talk in the pub.

Success took him all the way for Mercury Prize Gala (“such a strange ceremony”), but he did not let it impress his new album, The Bad Fire.

In fact, he forgot to fully mention his new manufacturer, John Kanglatton (St. Vincent, The Killers, Blondi, Modest Mouse) to mention the chart achievement.

He only came to know when a French journalist brought it into an interview.

“He was so, ‘Wait, your last album went to number one?” And we were like ‘yes’.

“And he was so, ‘wow, that’s Strange,

To be fair, he was right.

Mogwai is not a band that was ever lucky for global domination.

Long-term formed by friends, who wanted to create “severe guitar music”, a quartet in long, mesmerizing instruments clashed with a creep worry and disastrous pay-off.

When calculating the ranking, his journey of number one took 25 years, assisted by chart rules on the sale of physical records on streams.

Mogwai – a cult band with a fanbase that rewards vinyl – found the scales in his favor. For a great week, he dropped Dua Lipa and Harry Styles.

“It was a great surprise,” Brathwaite repeats.

“We want our music to do this too, but we are not Uber-Mahtvakshi. We are not like a queen, we are plotting world domination.”

But even if the band was interested to capitalize on his success, luck was conspiring against him.

As he prepared to record follow-ups, as love continues, keyboardist Barry Burns received news that every parent news: his daughter could die.

Doctors diagnosed her uplastic anemia, which is also known as bone marrow failure, where the body stops producing enough blood cells.

“She used to bleed from her gums and hurt everywhere,” she remembers. “It was very stressful.”

This condition is exceptionally rare, only 30 to 40 children were diagnosed per year, but Burns had the first hand experience of how serious it could be.

“The strange thing was that my neighbor when I was a child and, sadly, she died,” he says.

“So, of course, I really got nervous because I thought I know the result – but thankfully the treatment is completely different now.”

After a bone marrow transplant and chemotherapy, his daughter was recovered.

“She is going to recover, but I have a terrible two -year -old.”

It was not the only trauma that the band was experienced when making a record.

Live agent Mick Griffith, who had worked with him since his debut, died of cancer, while Basist Dominic Achison lost his father.

Even the pet dogs, prince of Brathwaite had problems, causing turmoil. “He got cancer and disintegrated his leg two weeks before he started recording,” he said.

Appropriately enough, the title of the album, The Bad Fire, is a Glasswagion word for hell. But to expect sorrow to anyone or a protest with mortality is for disappointment.

“If there is anything weighty in my life, the last thing I want to do is to write a song about it,” Brathwaite told Herald newspaper in 2003A ethos that is true today.

The large -scale instruments, their songs are left open for deliberate interpretation. The band cries to avoid imposing meaning with the title of nonsense to his compositions and with the joke (you lionel richie, secret pint, simon cruel).

The new album continues the tradition in which a delicious-titled track such as Pale Vegan hip pain and fanzin (although the Lion Rampus band can have the most self-individual entry in the discography of the Rampus band).

When the songs appear, they are opaque and impressive. The only sign of turbulance Mogwai falls on the grougi, deformation-dhoy 18 volcanoes, where Brathwaite sings quietly: “Hope another day has come/Keep me close in every way.,

“Some journalists in France said that the album was actually Cathartic, and I could see it,” they say. “But I don’t think it is Maudulin at all.

“It is vaguely excited by our standards.”

Last Friday, The Bad Fire is going to the top five of the UK album chart amidst a tough competition from Central CEE and Teddy Swims.

Again, physical sales will benefit the bad fire on streaming hit, a situation very happy about Brathwaite.

“The world of streaming is very luxurious and difficult to understand,” he says.

“It earns a lot of money, but it earns a lot of money with old music and popular back catalogs for artists, and I think it really discourage a very large label from investing in new music.”

He says that Spotify is filled with “fake band generic music” for its curated playlist, especially in styles such as chill-out, low-Fi and relaxation.

This is an allegation that has been repeatedly leveled against the streaming service, and which is called “clearly untrue”. But Brathwaite suspects.

“You fully know that if someone is going to make a generic AI music, then these streaming services are going to be, so they do not have to pay humans.”

However, streaming for Mogwai is not completely bad. On YouTube, his crepuscular 2005 album track take me vereware Nice has been streamful 85 million times.

The video is also not official. Uploaded by a fan, it is painted in a raised goldfish bowl with her head by a drawing of a girl.

Originally drawn by video game designer Kane Wong, the aura of the picture and the aura of isolation is synonymous with Mogwai’s song that some fans have turned it into tattoos.

“I almost want to go, ‘Met, you know, this is not a cover cover”, “Brathwaite said laughing. “But it’s good.

“And comments under the video are the endless message board of young children who are going through a difficult time supporting each other. A pain aunt is about it.

“This is one thing that I like about the digital world, these are other lives in that music.”

For Brathwaite, who read a lot of William Blake’s poetry during the recording of The Bad Fire, it is somewhat attractive about the possibility of art outlining its creator.

“I am obsessed with the concept of eternity within culture,” they say.

“William Blake laughed out of society for his views, but hundreds of years later, his paintings were introduced on the dome of St. Paul Cathedral, and Jerusalem is an informal English national anthem. It is incredible.

“I like this idea, when we went long, made some kind of mark.”

This year there is an additional echo in this concept, as Mogwai celebrates his 30th anniversary. They have traveled a long way, from Gobi Young Uparts, who sold their rivals a T-shirt cutting their rivals for the respected stallwarts of the British Rock Scene.

So what does it feel that this stage has reached? Was it something that he applied in his first practice, in front room of his parents’ house, on the first Tuesday after Glastonbury?

“Okay, I thought we are cars flying from this point,” Bithvet laughs. “So any happiness on this fact I was still taking out a living person as a musician, perhaps the lack of jet pack would be angry.”

To keep it in another way, it simply feels strange.