My friend Dogger has spent the last couple years slowly luring me into his post-rock world with some Mogwai here and some Bark Psychosis there. His cunning plan reached a climax on Saturday as he and I ventured to Turner Hall in Milwaukee to see Mogwai.
The ballroom at Turner Hall must have been quite a place back in the day with its large wooden floor and lovely designs on the columns. Stepping in there, one can imagine hordes of people dancing with more yet loitering in the cloister and in the balcony upstairs. Unfortunately, the place fell into disuse after a ceiling fire in 1941. While a restoration is ongoing, let's just say that a lot of work remains to be done. (The men's room, however, was quite nice.)
Starting the proceedings were Women, a 4-piece from Calgary, Alberta, Canada, who had played here in Madison the previous night.
They had quite a formula: start with jangly The Piper at the Gates of Dawn-era Floyd psychedelic pop and then abruptly come to a halt, do a 180 so you're facing the speakers and create a lot of feedback-laden aural pandemonium. This particular approach proved hit or miss. While I appreciated the noise, Women's pop sensibilities were not always on target. Some of the songs were nice'n'catchy in the best Syd Barrett kind of way while others were downright annoying. Like I said above, the noisy bits were great but they generally came out of left field and felt tacked on.
Mogwai took the stage more or less on time. I'm not overly familiar with the band's oeuvre but I found a setlist online:
The Precipice
Hunted By a Freak
You Don't Know Jesus
I Know You Are But What Am I?
I Love You, I'm Going to Blow Up Your School
Ithica
Summer
I'm Jim Morrison, I'm Dead
Friend of the Night
Auto Rock
2 Rights Make 1 Wrong
Batcat
Encore:
Helicon 1
We're No Here
The whole concept of post-rock is still a bit fuzzy for me but, as practiced by Mogwai, it consists of starting with a nice quiet guitar or piano bit and slowly building it up in a minimalist vein before playing very fast and very loudly. Think The Dirty Three but with lots of overdriven guitar instead of violin. Mogwai makes it work by virtue of a good sense of melody and an army of effects pedals and other gizmos to create a fairly diverse palate of sounds from which to choose.
And when I say that they played loudly, I mean it. One could make a good argument that these five Scotsmen tour in order to intentionally inflict cochlear damage upon its fans. Not only did they crank the amps up during the performance, they also finished the show with a cacophonic symphony of feedback loops that lasted 5+ minutes. Once back in the car, I had to check my ears to see if they were bleeding.
When I wasn't worrying about coming down with tinnitus, I was rather disappointed by the sound at Turner Hall which had the acoustics of a bathyscaphe. My opinion of Women might be a bit better had they not suffered from a poor mix and worse acoustics in the room. The vocals were almost inaudible while the bass was nothing more than a distorted rumble. And the poor drummer. I felt badly for him because it sounded like only his snare was actually miked.
Mogwai fared a bit better with a much more balanced mix but they too suffered from the ballroom's acoustics which sent the sound careering from side to side. At one point the hi-hat was to be heard in the corner of the ceiling above one of the stacks of speakers. Presumably it was getting up in the balcony, concentrated by the confined space, and bounced back out.
Despite the dreadful sound, I rather liked having Mogwai do their best to give me permanent hearing damage. Hopefully they'll return and play in a better venue.
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