(Chemical Underground)

www.chemicalundergroundrecords.com

When Scotland’s spacey post-everything guitar maulers Mogwai dropped Young Team into the calm of 1997, it had the crunch of leaden weight as sucked through a vacuum and spat out splintered; a tow truck pulled through a firestorm; a herd of cattle flung through a hurricane. Messy; brutish; but still with the delicacy of air, rain and floaty cosmos. Young Team really sat around the house but with its feet dangling high above the ottoman. “Mogwai Fears Satan” alone was the sort of wooly mammoth slow force epic you’d talk about ten years later, if you remembered ten years previous.

So to hear the morbid immensity and sonic manic-panic of guitarists Stuart Braithwaite, Dominic Aitchison, and John Cummings with un-rooted drummer Martin Bulloch shuffling through the soar with re-mastered clarity and a second “appendix” disc of live rarities, outtakes, singles and such, is like stripping the yellow waxy build up from the Scriptures and reading anew. And very loudly.

Standout Tracks: “Mogwai Fears Satan,” “Yes! I am a Long Way from Home” A.D. AMOROSI