Mogwai - Friend of the Night

I'm shocked to discover that I have hardly written about Mogwai in the 46 years I've been writing this blog. And yet, I can't think one one musical act that has soundtracked my life more than Mogwai in the past 10-15 years. In New York City subways, on Metro North, in desultory moments at home on the couch, on interminable airplane trips to Texas and California, at airport lounges in La Guardia and Houston and LAX, in bed late at night---it was always Mogwai.

I don't want to get into a long historical disquisition about Mogwai here. You can find the history of the band on the tubes of the internets, but what I will say is that their music has a deep deep deep deep reverberation in my psyche. Not all of it. Some of it is distant, remote, muddled. But most of it is so deeply lined, spliced, layered on my psychic being that words fail me. That sweet spot between melancholia and absolute loud fucking insane volume--that's where Mogwai resides. In order to truly experience the futility of life you have to experience its volume as the jet engine roar of the loudest guitar in the world feedbacks its rotary spinning clownsound into the ear drums of your soul.

I present "Friend of the Night" from 2006

 

 

The Waterboys - When Ye Go Away

 

This time that is upon me, this week, this month, this year, I feel strongly will be a time of departures. Of exits. Of retreats. I feel it in my bones. It may happen this fall. This song, introduced to me sometime in 1988 soundtrack a kind of exit too.

 I don't know anything about the background to the song but all the poets and all the bards of yore could not have distilled better the poetry of departure than simply: "I will cry, when you go away." 

Pete Townshend - There's A Fortune In Those Hills

Every so often I'll discover some new demo from Pete Townshend that he wrote in the early '70s, one he never released at the time, one consigned to Disc 7 of some massive box set from the 2010s that no one bought. Some brilliant piece of tossed off pop, something that lesser songwriters would have killed to have written, but for Townshend, it was nothing, just something forgotten and never released. 

Here's 'There's a Fortune in Those Hills,' a parable about an old man's delusions of something better just beyond the horizon. The chord sequences are so beautiful, you forget to breathe as it moves to the next one -- just gorgeous. The arrangements hark back to a lot of the countryfied sensibilities that he seemed to have embraced in that period. Guitar twang and all that. As with all his demos, he plays all the instruments.

I feel such a deep melancholia when the bridge comes on.

 

B.E.R. - The Night Begins to Shine

B.E.R. is a 'band' in the sense that a random group of studio musicians can be a 'band.' In 2005, a dude named Carl Burnett was assigned the task to come up with eighties-sounding song for the Warner Brothers in-house music library to use for any show that needed something like that in the background. Eventually in 2013-14, Burnett and two other dudes, Frank Enea and William J. Regan sharpened up the original song and produced a track called "The Night Begins to Shine." To identify themselves, they just referred to their 'band' by the acronym B.E.R. after their last names.

In 2014, the producer of the animated (and lest I say brilliant) TV show Teen Titans Go!, was looking for an '80s-themed song for an episode called "Slumber Party" and he used dug into the Warner Brothers library and used 10 seconds of "The Night Begins to Shine." Soon (the next season), the song became a favorite of one of the Teen Titans, Cyborg and the song blew up on YouTube. Next thing you know, the song charted up to number 23 on the national Billboards Top 100. Teen Titans Go! then did a four-episode arc on the song. Warner Brothers released a whole ep of songs by B.E.R. Famous people like Fall Out Boy and CeeLo Green did covers.

It's a brilliant song that veers on the right side of parody. Honestly it's better than any of the shlock that Asia, Survivor, Toto, or GTR came up with in the '80s. Bit it's also a cool thing that Burnett, Enea, and Regan get to be famous for 15 minutes (and hopefully make some bank) despite being anonymous muzak makers for Warner Brothers.

 

Angine De Poitrine - Live at KXEP (full performance)

Because it's 2026 and we need new shit. 

The new shit has arrived: 

Birthday Post: Fishmans - Long Season

 

Today, on my birthday, I am listening to the Long Season album by Fishmans, the Japanese band who specialized in a uniquely original mix of dub, electronics, pop, found sounds, and who knows what. The principal genius behind the band, Shinji Sato, unexpectedly passed away in March 1999, right after the release of Long Season (originally released in October 1998), so the music has now been forever suffused with a pall of what-might-have-been. By Long Season, the band was clearly at the peak of its powers, having released a series of absolutely stellar albums. But Long Season was the unexpected apotheosis of that trajectory--four musical movements arranged sequentially that take you on a short journey into the world of reverie. For a largely instrumental piece, the music is neither ponderous nor sombre -- there's a kind of elusive joy in it, but even without knowledge of lead author Sato's death, there's something about the four-chord structure that undergirds the track that feels ... weary. A joy of weariness, if you will. The sun shines bright in the song but imagine a trip across your city in car, your window open to sights and sounds and smells as neighborhoods pass in languid succession. Moments of experience are forgotten the moment you experience them. Nostalgia for the present. Perfect for a birthday....

 

 

If you'd like to dig deeper in the Fishmans universe, there is a great writeup at Pitchfork on Long Season here. In addition, someone at reddit has put together the most insane repository of Fishmans audio and video here.