So much instrumental rock music is often described as “soundtracks to movies that don’t exist,” but Come On Die Young always felt like the unofficial score to a film that did. The mournful “Helps Both Ways” is interlaced with color commentary from an NFL game, but far from undermining the track’s mournful tone, the chatter enhances it-the song feels like a cathode-ray-lit crime scene, as if we’re surveying the aftermath of some terrible domestic tragedy while "Monday Night Football" unsympathetically blares in the background. And in lieu of creepily whispered Brian McMahan-style narratives, Come On Die Young sees Mogwai deploy found-sound dialogue to equally unnerving effect. Here, Mogwai aren’t so much copying Slint as envisioning the more expansive, exploratory band they could’ve evolved into: “Year 2000 Non-Compliant Cardia” may swipe its jagged opening strums straight from the “Good Morning Captain” playbook, but redirects them into a slumberous, opium-den psychedelia that counts as one of this album’s few moments of levity “May Nothing But Happiness Come Through Your Door” embellishes the “Cortez the Killer”-inspired lurch of Slint’s “Washer” with glockenspieled counter-melodies and a gradually intensifying climax. Even the sudden, eardrum-blasting jolts of Young Team signature “Like Herod” are no comparison to the surprise that occurs when the ominous, pressure-building hum of “Punk Rock:” dissolves into the teary-eyed tranquility of “Cody”, which sees Mogwai hitch themselves to Galaxie 500’s “Tugboat” and-thanks to a rare and surprisingly affecting lead vocal from guitarist Stuart Braithwaite-produce the most quietly devastating song in their canon to date.īy uncanny coincidence, this 15th-anniversary reissue arrives mere weeks after Slint’s more randomly timed 23rd-anniversary Spiderland box set was released, but revisiting both records in tandem highlights their differences as much as their similarities. Where they once shocked with volume and dissonance, Come On Die Young disarms with elegance and grace.
But by playing to post-rock type, Come On Die Young ultimately expanded Mogwai’s emotional vocabulary.
So on Come On Die Young, Mogwai went about becoming the most sullen, brooding post-rock band they could possibly be, with each melancholic guitar refrain and desolate, dead-of-night snare-drum tap serving as a deliberately set breadcrumb trail to more Spiderland comparisons.
Tellingly, “Punk Rock:” ends on an open-ended note, with an increasingly exasperated Iggy asking Gzowski, “Do you understand what I’m saying, sir?” The question is left hanging in the ether, as if to suggest that no amount of reasoning will change the opinions of those who’ve already made up their mind about you. But as much as it overtly asserts Mogwai’s allegiance to the rock iconoclasts of yore, the track also betrays the band’s own frustration with being misunderstood beyond being propped up as post-rock poster boys, Mogwai had been variously hyped as the Scottish Slint and the new Pink Floyd.
Rather, overtop a foreboding, percussion-less guitar instrumental, we hear the voice of Iggy Pop in a televised 1977 interview with Canadian broadcaster Peter Gzowski, explaining the difference between the commoner’s caricatured conception of punk and his own more spiritual, empowering interpretation of the term. As such, it was no surprise that Mogwai’s would open the album with a song called “Punk Rock:”, even if it wasn’t a punk rock song at all.
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