Young Team

I bought Young Team when it came out, back when £15 in HMV bought you an album you’d only ever read about—which meant playing it over and over until it gave up its secrets, partly because you had the time, partly because £15 was £15. Young Team confused me. It challenged me. It took a while to really click. Click it did.

“Yes I am a long way from home” sets the template—and, as it turns out, the template for Mogwai’s whole career: the gentle build, the sense of something unfurling, controlled bursts of noise punctuating the calm. “Like Herod” then takes that template and stretches it in every direction at once: longer, quieter, louder, more hypnotic, messier, more majestic. “Tracy” is unhurried and contemplative, a feeling magnified if you turn the volume up at the end and catch the phone conversation about what sounds like a sizeable physical altercation within the band. “R U Still in 2 It”, with its spare instrumentation, repeating refrain, and lyrics about a narrator trying to right a relationship that’s already gone, remains darkly affecting nearly thirty years on.

The sequencing is immaculate, culminating with “Mogwai Fear Satan”, which justifies its sixteen minutes and remains the best thing the band have ever done; apocalyptic, cinematic, the sound of a group throwing vast amounts of noise and feeling at a wall via a handful of chords and a few simple riffs and somehow constructing elegance out of it. The flute that arrives near the end sits atop the chaos and offers clear juxtaposition to the insistent drumming beneath.

Young Team doesn’t immediately come to mind when I list my favourite albums, and I sometimes wonder whether I’m too forgiving of the records I first heard as a teenager. This one passes the nostalgia test. It still thrills.