Tag Archives: mogwai

Mogwai ‘Mexican Grand Prix’ (video)

UPDATE: from now until Feb 15 you can stream the new cd from Rolling Stone, I’m liking it so far, natch!

Best music of 2009

live photo of Part Chimp courtesy of Last.FM

Well 2009 was another stellar year for music if you ask me, and as usual, my yearly ‘top’ list is going on a month late. I always have these grand designs of writting a short paragragh about each selection, why I picked it, how I first heard it, etc, but you know how that goes.  I will say that this year, while I’ve gotten into many bands the way I have in years past (trolling record stores, randomly listening to anything I can find online), I’ve also found things I wouldn’t have found thanks to my Twitter account.  While those who don’t get  Twitter think it’s just folks updating what they had for breakfast, if you stick around, dig deeper and find the right people to follow, it’s amazing wealth of information.  Not requiring the effort of say a blog post allows rapid, unvarnished opinions, spouted out between people’s day to day tasks, which I always prefer since I feel I’m more lucid after a few cups of coffee while something is blaring in my ears. New this year is the reissues section, what with things like OK Computer and Young Team being reissued, I can’t help but highlight them.

As always I want to give a hat tip to the fabulous folks at my neighborhood record store, Euclid Records, where I bought almost all of these discs over the past year.  I also want to recognize people like Ryan, Anthony, Mary, @fcervantes, @plasmatron, @koppper @crankin and Yvonne for a continued stream of what has their attention at any particular time – grabbing stuff and listening to it later when I have more time always reveals new sounds to me, so thanks for that. Also, as always, this list will be added to my ever expanding Noise page here, listing my favs from 2001 to the present.

Ok enough of this babble, hell, I already have a couple of possible contenders for next years list!

Upcoming live release from Mogwai

This year Mogwai will release a live cd and album, Special Moves, and a dvd, Burning, covering a three night set during the 2009 shows in Brooklyn.  Here they are doing Mogwai Fear Satan, which while from the same tour, is not from the film, but is shot by the same people (thanks for the info Stuart, pictured above) so it’s a good look into what to expect. If it’s all like this it looks like the perfect live film in my opinion, focused on the band interactions and movement, not the audience.  To find out more, and get a free mp3 download of 2 Rights Make 1 Wrong from the set, visit Special Moves.  Can’t wait to see/hear this, after taking a long time to get into The Hawk Is Howling, I’m ready to see them live again.  I was still ‘digesting’ the re-release of Young Team that I bought in London last year, but it’s been a long time since I’ve seen them live as they haven’t toured St. Louis, and the Austin gigs were too long ago to count.  Just can’t wait for this release.