Mogwai's Young Team is not an album to be enjoyed, it's an album to be admired. This is the kind of album that you buy not to listen to but to display on a shelf and intimidate visitors, like you do with Moby Dick and gourmet cheeses. Friends will walk in, put their hands over their hearts, and say in awestruck tones, "Oh! You listen to Mogwai!", with optional bowing and scraping. Apparently you can take any moody guitar riff and repeat it for ten minutes straight and people will hail the result as a visionary epic. If you can do the same thing with nine more indistinguishable riffs and make an album of it, it's a revelation.
A very beautiful and subtly bleak debut by a great Post-Rock band. This is the origin of the quiet-loud-quiet motif frequently found in 3rd Wave. Mogwai's performance on Young Team is fairly restrained and constant, but is able to create a powerful atmosphere from track to track. I visualize walking around in an unknown city that speaks an unknown language, not unlike the album cover.
Interesting. While in terms of post-rock, this is quite varied in style, it's actually rather boring. Anyway, still a nice and interesting record. Just not as brilliant as made out to be.
