When discussing Mogwai, it’s too easy to talk about tension and release, about loudness and its absence, about tantalizing gestures toward the industrial-strength machinery whirring behind a velvety sonic curtain. And it’s all too easy to talk about Mogwai Young Team at the exclusion of all else. Ten years on, many critics and fans would still prefer to act as though the story of this album is the period-point-blank story of Mogwai, despite the four full-length follow-ups of diminishing returns. To some (including this reviewer), news of a remastered, reissued Young Team with outtakes was more exciting than the prospect of a new album. But as tempting as the rhetoric of reissue packaging and bonus material is, take this album for the album, not the trimmings.
Only the first of the nominal tenth-anniversary bonus disc’s tracks is previously unreleased, and it’s not hard to see why. The cover of Spacemen 3’s “Honey” is Mogwai doing sugar and love as well as they can -- it's better than their own similarly themed compositions, but sweetness was never really the band’s strength. Most of the extra tracks are live takes of album material, which are interesting, but rendered irrelevant by bad mixes that fail to capture the dynamic lifts and sheer drops of the band’s concert repertoire. The alternate version of “R U Still In 2 It?” might be excepted, though only because the vocals (by Arab Strap’s Aiden Moffat) assume prominence, which ironically reinforces the track as a better portrait of a relationship arcing towards failure than anything Arab Strap ever wrote. The best of Mogwai’s ancillary work from this time is already collected on the singles disc Ten Rapid, which stands up better than the band’s last two albums and would be more worthy of your hard-earned cash if this reissue was only about odds ‘n’ sods.
But disc 2 is just gravy for the roast beast centerpiece of Young Team itself, which comes to us now from the Chemikal Underground deli case in a finer, heavier-cut slab than previously released. The debut was, and is, a straight knockout: 5 for 5, not quite like anything the increasingly sleepy band has done since. The twin trademark bone crushers “Mogwai Fear Satan” and “Like Herod” get a booster shot to keep them socking the air out of unsuspecting guts from the dorm room to the boardroom, though the bystanders asking if the listener’s gasping-out-loud, headphones-askew ass is alright are probably more likely office colleagues than freshman roommates these days. Beyond those two oft-cited pillars of pulchritude, the remastering job also brings out subtler, rounder tones in other highlights like “Yes! I Am A Long Way From Home” and “Tracy,” tracks that were squished flat on the original.
In a way, a little bit of the lower-fi mystery of the album’s original Exile on Main Street murk has departed with the high-def clarity of this version. What the remastering shows best, though, is that Young Team hasn’t gotten softer with age; Mogwai were always good at the light stuff and used to be better at keeping you interested in it.
