A few minutes before Mogwai would take to the stage at Moody Theater on Monday night, I texted a friend the following:
“At the Mogwai show and forgot my damn earplugs. Pray for me.”
It’s true, the Glaswegian post-rockers can get pretty noisy, but it’s a beautiful noise, and one they’ve honed over the course of their nearly 30 year long career. And the band were in town not just to play any old show, but to play a show in promotion of If The Stars had A Sound, the Antony Crook-directed documentary on the band, premiering at this year’s SXSW Film Festival
Following a solid set of spacey dub from De Facto, Glasgow’s finest took to the stage to play roughly one hour and 30 minutes of music that had its moments of both brutal heaviness and sublime beauty, often within the same song.
Near the end of their set, the band’s Stuart Braithwaite took a moment to call out the SXSW festival for having the U.S. Army and an arms manufacturer as sponsors. And while they may not have joined the now-sizeable contingent of performers who have bowed out of the festival entirely and/or canceled their official shows in protest, Braithwaite and his bandmates certainly made their position known.
Keep on making noise, Mogwai.