Since day one, Mogwai have felt, above all others, like the band that ArcTanGent was made for. Apparently a late 2024 booking, slotted in above intended headliners Electric Wizard when their availability was confirmed, and with a fee above and beyond the allocated artist budget, there’s a hell of a lot of expectation heaped on the legendary Glaswegians’ climactic Sunday headline set.
So contrarian is their reputation, however (‘frontman’ Stuart Braithwaite concludes a Q&A earlier in the day by explaining, in detail, why British rock royalty Queen are a ‘terrible’ band) and so mercurial is their music, that it’s never a safe bet on whether they’ll opt to barnstorm their way to stealing the show or creep through deep cuts to delight the hardcore. That’s very much the point.
Ambling into life with the dragged drums, keys and (admittedly deafening) textural guitars of To The Bin My Friend, Tonight We Vacate The Earth from 2021’s shock UK Number One album As The Love Continues, it seems initially like this isn’t the landmark gig for them that it is for so many in attendance. Even the festival’s inbuilt video screens are curtained in favour of a more old-school light show.
It's I’m Jim Morrison, I’m Dead that reminds you of Mogwai’s elemental power, a composition that could be reduced to near ambience cranked up and electrified to cataclysmic effect. The ever-layering guitars of Rano Pano are a first foray into truly eardrum-bursting territory, but then you’re taken on a tour of heavier atmospheric hits, from the trippy vocoder-laden Hunted By A Freak and rare sing-song Richie Sacramento, to the noisy clatter of Ex-Cowboy, and propulsive, upbeat classic How To Be A Werewolf.
It’s over an awesome final 30 minutes that they really blow you away, however. As if accepting an unspoken challenge laid down by the mighty Wizard, a titanic, 12-minute Like Herod becomes the heaviest song unleashed all weekend, its fake-out retreats into near silence and deafening returns knocking the uninitiated on their arses. Old Poisons buries punky influence in its dissonant, discordant high volume, while Remurdered employs the synths one last time for a bit of thrillingly throwback John Carpenter-worship. Then We’re No Here absolutely brings the house down. Already one of the greatest post-rock songs of all time, it's deployed with a purpose and venom that is simply transcendent, ending in a perfect wash of noise, with the full array of guitars left to spiral into feedback only eventually cut off for the 11pm noise curfew.