Mogwai, Usher Hall, Edinburgh

Photo: Michael Gallacher
The recently restored domed Usher Hall is celebrating its centenary with a series of events, including this invasion by Glasgow’s loudest band. An audience clearly here for a musical statement rather than a fashion one buzz with anticipation. A large hovering eye and colourful geometric shapes hang suspended over the stage, adding to the impressive grandeur of the surroundings. A phalanx of guitars and as many amps are at the ready and there follows a survey of the quintet’s career from ‘Young Team’ through to ‘Rave Tapes’. Mogwai’s music is an exercise in controlled extremes, of build up and release, transcending anything as prosaic as mere songs (apart from the whispered vocals of ‘Take Me Somewhere Nice’ and some vocoder on newer numbers). In between, Stuart Braithwaite is unfailingly polite, sipping what looks suspiciously like Buckfast and alternating between guitar and bass.

At this volume and in these surroundings it can’t help but achieve grandeur but never becomes grandiose. Luke Sutherland’s violin adds another layer as the giant hexagons pulsate. Producing a noise that most bands would save for their closing number, Mogwai’s sound is enigmatic and un-categorisable – heavy rock structures without the posturing, a guitar sound that builds and builds into excoriating blasts leaving the listener gasping at its audacity. The lack of visual stimulation, beyond a few green lights, forces submission to the noise.

The final encore of ‘Batcat’ brings a kind of weird, exhausted enlightenment - Mogwai operate in a different paradigm, all their own. Oblique themes where each lead instrument battles against the others until they all work together. Different starting points all heading towards self obliteration. They can be blank but not bleak, fierce but not angry, awesome in the old fashioned sense like a powerful natural phenomenon.