You could eat the sense of occasion with a spoon. One of Glasgow's most beloved bands, returning after a between-albums hiatus, playing a rescheduled show for what was originally planned as the inauguration of the city's bespoke new music venue. Each old song is received as though it's a standard delivered by Judy Garland at Carnegie Hall; barely have a few notes sounded before a wild, welcoming cheer rises up.
Other than Radiohead, who arguably draw on a broader palette, Mogwai are the only British band of any size to push at the limits of what is possible with guitars. Three guitars, in fact - churning deliriously as the monstrous riff of We Are No' Here, one of two new songs making its debut, rolls inexorably forward, conjuring the kind of grandeur only done justice by the word "byzantine".
The joyous, constantly rising melody of Glower of a Cat is as reminiscent of Bach as any of the band's more obvious influences: My Bloody Valentine, Sonic Youth, Slint, New Order and the Cure. Indeed, Mogwai are as much classical musicians drawing from a nominally rock'n'roll format as they are rock.
Where they used to pummel audiences into submission (which they can still do), now their sets are more concise and their battleplan less like blitzkrieg and more like seduction. Tracy is gradually woven from a single, silver thread of guitar, before blossoming and ebbing away with flawless grace. There is something sepulchral, hymnal about Mogwai's newer music - an impression intensified by the rare appearance of treated, dehumanised vocals, a kind of alien chorale.
Perhaps part of what makes Mogwai successful, and binds together their largely male, bloke-ish audience, is that they suggest the vastness and force of intense feeling without articulating specific feelings. It's possible that such specificity, allied to music this powerful, would simply be too much to endure. What's great is the blankness, the attempt to capture the ineffable, a perfectly distilled happy/ sadness somewhere between dogged resilience and a weightless euphoria.
