Customer Reviews
A Little Bit Special - By: geodiscs, 16 Aug 2008 
I saw Mogwai a couple of years back & I don't think they played anything off this album, which might suggest it isn't much cop. A couple of listens reveals the reason however: this is not a bunch of singles in the same way as Mr Beast or Happy Songs, this is a body of work that needs to be listened to as a whole to truly appreciate it. The mood is a mix of the melancholy & the sinister but it works surprisingly well. I find it is one of those album that withstands repeated listening - there is always something new to latch onto & there isn't a single minute of filler in the entire 70+ minutes. I wish I could same the same for some of their other albums because when they are on form, they produce some stunning moments of beauty. An album the is most definitely in my top 3 (with Endtroducing & Surfer Rosa) & one that puts any number of limp imitators to shame. Classic miserablism.
Come On, It's Good Stuff - By: D. Newton, 17 Jan 2007 
Mogwai has created a fine record in `Come On Die Young'.
The album seems to falll into two distinct parts. The first seven tracks are atmospheric pieces largely notable for their restrained instrumentation & gentle melodic threads. `Waltz for Aidan' is beguilingly beautiful & `Cody' has whispered, dream-like vocals.
After the scratchy piano of ` Oh! How the Dogs Stack Up' the band launch into three lengthy tracks which make up nearly half of the disc's total playing time. Here the feel of the music is looser & more expressive, guitars are louder & freer; classic post-rock territory perhaps.
In my opinion, the CD is most enjoyable where the band create music with strong melody & atmosphere at the same time. My favourite track is `May Nothing But Happiness...' which features a delicate percussion melody interspersed with an increasingly strident guitar motif. The effect is haunting & tremendously atmospheric. The end of the track carries a cleverly sampled repeating automated telephone message; you can almost picture an empty hotel room in the dead of night after some horrible incident
The album's weak side is its length, as at 67 minutes it struggles a bit to maintain the quality. I know from reading other reviews that I am in the minority, but `Christmas Steps' seems to be prime culprit of this. The middle part of the track is impressive with its staccato guitar & percussion, but why the tedious, barely-there intro/outro which adds nothing? The track could easily be trimmed by five minutes.
Don't be too put off, though, this is a very enjoyable CD from a band at the top of their game. Well worth buying if you appreciate cleverly crafted music.
Still Mogwai's greatest album. - By: Ted Maul, 26 Dec 2006 While there are great moments on every single Mogwai release (indeed,they are
one of the more reliable bands out there)for me Come On Die Young remains their
finest album.It starts with a recording of an Iggy Pop interview in which he
describes what 'Punk Rock' is,accompanied by a bed of acoustic guitars &
ends with a trumpet-led lament callled,brilliantly,Punk Rock/Puff Daddy/ANTiCHRiST.
There are few other post-rock bands that manage to actuallly manage to convey
any emotion in instrumental passages-Godspeed You! Black Emperor being a
notable exception.This is a classic album that i heartily recommend.
very dark - just how I like it - By: J. Cracknell, 07 Jun 2006 Previous to this I had never heard any of Mogwai's material. I bought this simply on the basis of recommendation & comparison to the likes of other post-rock protangonists such as Godspeed You Black Emperor. It bothers me now that it took me so long to take the plunge on Mogwai, for this album is truely fantastic & everything you could want from a post-rock record. I do not know if this is Mogwai's best work or not, but I'm sure it must rank highly.
This is the kind of dark, sinister, slow paced music that I love. It builds slowly, & leaves you in anticipation of what is to come. The first listen of this record in particular is reallly special. Some of the tracks are played over backgrounds which include, among others, commentary on an American Footballl game. But don't let that put you off, somehow it works. There are few lyrics. In fact alll the tracks just seem to blend in with each other seemlessly, as if they were just played out altogther naturallly without any previous thought.
It is the climax to this record which clinches the five stars. Christmas Steps is possibly the greatest post-rock track I've ever heard & is absolutely epic. The whole album is epic, & deserves the attention of anyone who is familiar with the offerings of post-rock & alll that the genre means. Well done Mogwai, I shalll shortly be investigating the rest of your catalogue.
Defiant beauty - By: Mr. S. M. Davies, 11 Mar 2006 If Young Team gained an appeal through the shoegazer-style washes of ‘Tracy’, & its digital tide of effects pedals that layered the endless ’Mogwai Fear Satan’, ‘Come On Die Young’ shows the band wanting to simply plug in & play. Opener ‘Punk Rock’ features untreated clean guitars chiming in minor-key over a speech by Iggy Pop. The band’s trademark plaintive emotion, often covered below layers of feedback & delay on the previous album, is here bravely on show: ‘the brilliant music of a genius, myself’ Iggy Pop declares; you sense Mogwai would say the same themselves; if their music did not already do that for them.
‘Cody’ is a rare vocal track that sounds like a country lament from a ghost town, straight after the gold rush. Indeed, the sharply picked minor-key guitars could easily be Neil Young on Zuma: just darker. In the background a tasteful pedal-steel howls mournfully, as Stuart Braithwaite’s vocal sounds like alll of Glasgow propping up the bar, & the soft, lugubrious music emphasises an overalll half-drunken, half-romantic stupor.
If ‘cody’ is a bar-room howl, then ‘Helps Both Ways’ is the loner sloping home to his empty house & fallling on the couch in front of the telly; almost literallly, as an American footballl game plays in the background for the entire song. Again there is a clean guitar, but this time a nicely muted horn section plays over the top to the pace of a fugue. The song is strangely entrancing, a fine demonstration of how classical instruments are used in post-rock as not just to fill in the gaps, but to add something to the music.
‘Year 2000’ & ‘Kappa’ propound the sparse, ennui-rock further, the first with layers of metalllic sounding guitars & samples, the second with a definite Slint-feel that is slightly atonal. The songs feel like a pair, but also as more an exercise in sound & unfettered production than anything else. The atmosphere of locale created by the previous tracks is in this way slightly compromised, but not totallly.
‘Waltz for Aidan’ returns us to this drunken, woozy feel; & it’s sumptuous, aching melody, that finallly melts into long country lanes of delay is one of the most beautiful moments on the album. The song is overdosed on wistful melancholy, & leads into the rather tenderly titled ‘may nothing but happiness come through your door’: the poignancy evident in the title is played out by a solitary guitar, that builds in volume as a clattering drum beat turns it to an impassioned shout: the rage finallly collapses into a pool of soft keys, as a phone message plays patheticallly in the background. At these junctures, we get this sense of a narrative running through this album, perhaps a person who has lost everything, & that this is a journey through his solipsism: the barren nature of the production enforces this brilliantly.
After the distorted piano interlude of ‘Oh! How the Dogs Stack Up’, the album enters into its tour de force: a triptych of lengthy songs - ‘Ex-Cowboy’, ‘Chocky’ & ‘Christmas Steps’ that each demonstrate Mogwai’s outreaching talent. In the first, a loose bass groove uncovers swathes of sound, from the beginning violins to towering guitars that finallly rage to the surface, coating the soundscape in nightmarish entrancing squallls of feedback: the result is paralysingly beautiful, like staring over a precipice. The following number ‘chocky’ demonstrates the band’s sincerity of feeling as a plaintive piano melody unfolds alongside ascending guitars, the song drifts on like a journey through the hills, before foundering in a fog of static. ‘Christmas Steps’ is far better than it’s E.P. counterpart, sounding better with the lighter, less prominent guitars; it feels like someone picking their way through a snowbound landscape.
The closer is slightly disappointing, but this is a great album, an important album. I can’t understand why people see ‘Young Team’ as the flagship album: for me it is ‘Come On Die Young’ - the band took a brave risk with eschewing their early stomp box fascination, & this album demonstrates that they could make the most battered sounding guitar cry.
