encore:

thanks to brian and aldous xenon.

support from cex.

links

www.chrisnj.com - christian johnson's photos of the show

reviews/comments

from brian:

it was a really short show. the sound of the show wasn't the greatest. might have been the venue. probably less than 100 people showed up.

from aldous xenon:

cex opened the show with a bang. full of energy, and entertaining as hell to watch, but unfortunately a short set. he played his set on the floor with the audience, as opposed to on the stage. however, if you did look on the stage, mogwai, all of them, were standing there watching rjyan do his thing, all with big grins.

mogwai came on about 15 minutes later. the new stuff sounds wonderful live, and despite some technical problems, (martin's hi-hat broke at the end of 'hunted by a freak', barry's guitar stopped working during 'you don't know jesus', others) the show was absolutely amazing. martin's drums were nowhere to be heard during 'mogwai fear satan', as the guitars dominated the sound. set ended in the typical fashion, stuart breaking all but two strings and john completely gutting his guitar and hanging it from an amp while he manipulated his pedals.

i managed to snag a setlist, and afterwards got my 'come on die young' poster signed by the band. stuart and martin were nice enough to sit down and talk to me for about 10 minutes. an absolutely perfect show with a great ending.

from las vegas mercury by andrew kiraly:

you've got to wonder if a generation of hipster kids has been tricked- -tricked into becoming fans of easy-listening music, tricked into rejiggering their mental wiring so that rock concerts encourage politeness, mandate introspection and--yikes--repay careful attention. so go the aims of the borecore movement, in which bands such as mogwai, godspeed you black emperor! and sigur ros zen-whack kids with a plush dreampop mallet in hopes of undoing the damage of 50-plus years of rock 'n' roll stupidity. rock music livens in the short run, deadens in the long; borecore does the opposite. the crowd's yawns and watch-glances at mogwai's show gave way, soon enough, to a kind of studied immersion as the band plunged on last thursday night.

it was boring at first. par for the course: mogwai has not only addressed this as a sort of operational hazard, but embraced it as part of the operation itself. snore-rock purveyors know that boredom, that enemy goblin of our oh-so-beloved work ethic, can breed a powerful brand of attentiveness. thus it's not long before you eventually get sucked into the lush spaces between the music, register it like a physicality, and really start to enjoy this churchy jam band music in a post-millennial age when musicians offer solace while all the priests are busy fucking boys.

after a funny splash of technopunk karaoke by some dude called cex, mogwai began its hour-and-a-half set by diving right into its latest album, happy songs for happy people, with the shimmer and gurgle of "hunted by a freak," which stretched and morphed like a neon amoeba (but never in messy fashion). following up with the cheerful ding-dong of "kids will be skeletons," the band was perhaps grooming the crowd's collective brain for more strenuous stuff; by mogwai standards, these were two-minute punk anthems. indeed, those into mogwai's earlier work--the linty epics on young team and come on die young--might've been disappointed by a set list that leaned toward recent works. then again, if mesmerized bemusement is the new sign of a successful rock show, mogwai scored high on this night, particularly when it hit the crowd with its 20-minute encore, "my father my king," which serves as a smorgasbord of mogwai's favorite techniques: the elliptical openings, shifts in dynamics and sustained noise attacks in which feedback becomes an instrument in itself and bears something approaching a cleansing affect. i sure felt scrubbed and tingly after the show. yeah, standing stiff-legged in a wind of scouring noise does that.