Review: Mogwai, The Bad Fire

We got snow here in Seattle yesterday for the first time this Winter. My partner and I had been out late the night before with some friends. We dragged ourselves to breakfast and our amphetamine-friendly server kept giving us updates on the snow, even though we could see it by turning our heads and looking for ourselves out the big bay windows of the cafe.

I walked her to her car in the cold between snow flurries. It melted almost immediately here in the lowlands, leaving the streets shiny and wet like they are much of the year. At least it will stick in the mountains. A friend who has more sensible worries than me has been talking about how bad the snowpack is this year. I guess it will make for a bad smoke season.

I spent the day doomscrolling and listening to the new Mogwai album, The Bad Fire. Post-rock seems to me to be the defining genre of institutional and social decline. It’s the auditory version of those glasses in They Live. Put on a good GY!BE or Russian Circles album and the rot suddenly seems more visible. Mogwai’s latest effort had the same world altering effect. It was the perfect soundtrack to stories about ghouls ripping the copper wiring out of US government institutions and plotting the next wave of gratuitous violence and immiseration.

The album’s really fucking good, at least. It starts off with a track that’s a strong statement of what makes post-rock interesting. The rich textures and temporal variety of “God Gets You Back” are a masterclass in experimental weirdness. Its spacey, arpeggiated opening kicks off a journey that really sets a tone for the album. I’m not a Mogwai completionist, so I don’t know if this marks a departure for the band, but it certainly seems lighter and more synth-focused than previous work of theirs that I’ve listened to. It’s a nicely layered track that picks up momentum and creates the kind of richly-textured soaring passages that only make sense after a long build up. Its vocals are interesting since they function less as a narrative or melodic mechanism and more like another instrumental layer. (This is true of several track on the record, more on it later.) The track’s sudden drop-off ending feels like a mistake to me (especially considering the well-crafted codas that some of the other textually-rich, slow-burn songs on the record feature). But this might just be aesthetic preference on my part. A sudden stop to a track always jars me and, in my opinion, has never improved a song.

From the weird, lilting opening bars of “Hi Chaos”, I knew it was going to be my favorite song on the album. I’m a sucker for the strange, and its staggering 6/8 rhythm makes it just enough of an outlier to really capture my attention on a first listen. The haunting guitar hook strings together noisy breaks of distorted squalling, with a subdued breakdown in the middle that serves as almost perfect negative space. From there it climbs up a caterwalling wall of noise before dropping off a cliff. (Here, too, I would have liked a bit of a coda. Maybe it is just an aesthetic hangup on my part.)

One of my compulsive obsessions is which songs mark the apex of an album. Not the best song on the album, or the most epic or energetic, but rather what track in the back half of the album seems to draw the cohesive whole of the album to its climax. Not every album has one, but every album should have one. For The Bad Fire, it seems pretty clear to me that it’s “Hammer Room”, which surprises me somewhat. It’s a bit of a tonal outlier, but seems a fitting culmination. As a cheery, boppy little gem of a song it feels suffused with hope. It also seems to draw that hopeful through line from the two tracks before it. “18 Volcanoes” before it opens with one of the few easily-discernible vocal lines on the entire album: “hope has come another day”. The track before that, “If you Find This World Bad, You Should See Some of the Others” feels titled to call out me (and my mood), specifically. How many times the past few years have I been the one to admonish my friends that a better world is possible.

I actually think it’s this hopeful strain that culminates in “Hammer Room” that might be the single most defining element of the album as a whole for me. Maybe this obsession with the climax of records is a mistake on my part, but if it is, I come by it honestly. I’ve always felt some significance in the one defining track falling two-thirds to three-fourths of the way through the album and this one absolutely smashes it. From the Looper-esque drum groove to the wobbly, spacey synths it’s a work of joy and light. In a way it feels like everything before it has been one long build to this one golden groove.

I really liked the use of vocals on this record. Vocals on a post-rock record are always a dangerous indulgence. They run the risk of tipping a song over the edge from self-serious into self-important. Mogwai manages to escape that pitfall by mostly using vocals for tone and texture. This is most obvious on the raucous, keyboard-forward “Fanzine Made of Flesh”, in which the vocals are vocoder-ed to the point of being nearly indecipherable. This doesn’t actually detract from them, though, rather it makes them almost a Rorschach layer on top of the track. The distorted vocals, plus the more traditional structure, make it feel as if it should be a glammy pop-rock banger, but there isn’t a single hook or turn of phrase for your ear to pick out and obsess over. It’s a remarkably effective bit of deceit.

If you’ve ever liked any Mogwai, then I think you’ll love The Bad Fire. They’re in fine form. Really, if you’re a fan of any post-rock at all, and are bought into the idea of experimental, textually-rich rock music, then it’s definitely worth checking out. (You’d have to be even more cynical than I to dislike it just for its soaring, peppy synth lines; they’re really quite charming.) It might be a tougher listen if you have more traditional tastes in rock and roll. I’d suggest giving “Fanzine Made of Flesh” a listen first. If that resonated with you at all, then it’s probably worth it to listen to the entire album from the start. Put it on when you’re going for a late-night walk and just see what it does to your view of the world around you.