I Just Read About That…

SOUNDTRACK: MOGWAI-Happy Songs for Happy People (2003).

Happy Songs for Happy People follows up Rock Action with more sedate music from Mogwai.  In fact, while Rock Action was pretty mellow (with a few bursts of noise) HMFHP is even more mellow.

Although it does open with a rocking track: “Hunted By a Freak.”  “Hunted” is one of Mogwai’s best songs.  It opens the disc with a catchy riff, some cool synthesized vocals and great washes of sounds.  It’s great on record and even better live.  But starting with “Moses I Am’n’t” the album takes a decidedly more mellow approach.  “Moses” is a song of slow washes layered on each other. There’s interesting textural sounds on display, but not a lot of melody.  It leads to “Kids Will Be Skeletons,” another mellow layered song.  It has a simple melody with delicate (!) keyboard washes.

But just when you think Mogwai have gone all soft, “Killing All the Flies” adds some intense sounds to the disc. It is similarly structured to the earlier songs on the disc, although it has some rather happy-sounding guitar lines in it.  It also grows in intensity about two-thirds of the way through.

“Boring Machines Disturbs Sleep” (sic) is a short, quiet song with subdued vocals.  It’s followed by “Ratts of the Capital” the only really long song here (8 and a half minutes).  It opens in this more subdued vein (is that a glockenspiel I hear?), but by 4 and a half minutes all you hear is guitar–growing louder and louder.  There are solos buried in the noise that threaten to explode out of the speakers, but they ultimately seem to hold back a wee bit.

“Golden Porsche” mellows things out again with a very pretty, very simple song (almost 3 minutes of beautiful melody) that reminds me of the interludes in Twin Peaks.  “I Know You Are But What Am I?” opens with a tense kind of piano (with some slightly off chords).  They merge with pretty keyboard notes which counteract the somewhat sinister feel of the main riff.

The disc ends with “Stop Coming to My House” (Mogwai have always excelled at song titles).  It’s a very subdued track (quiet drums propel waves of keyboards) and as the songs continues, more and more waves layer on each other until it just all fades away.

I obviously prefer the louder, more raucous Mogwai tracks, so these two albums are not what I think of when I think Mogwai.  These two albums feel like the work of a more mature, more restrained band–as if they are deliberately trying to put constraints on their music to see what they can achieve.  But even if they are less intense, the songs are wonderfully structured and show a still show a great emotional range.

[READ: June 07, 2011] “Clever Girl”

This was a fascinating story and is yet another story by Tessa Hadley that I really enjoyed.  And it’s another story that I didn’t realize was set in England until the fourth paragraph, which opens “Mum unpacked.”

Anyhow, this story follows Stella, a young girl whose family moves to a small suburb that has recently been developed (trees were cut down and none newly planted).  Stella and her mother used to live alone together for many years, but recently Stella’s mom met Norbert.  They married and moved into this new suburban house.

The story is told in past tense about the events from Stella’s childhood.  But there are occasional moments where the narrator pops in and offers some moments of “grown up Stella” perspective–like maybe she could have been nicer to Norbert.  Grown up Stella realizes that Nortbert was really perfect for her mom (especially since she was an older woman,  with a grown daughter).  At the time, she thought that Norbert seemed okay, but the whole move has upset her sensibilities.  [I also love that Norbert is known as “Nor,” which is wonderfully contradictory.]

After they move into their new house, Stella goes to the backyard and sits on one of the remaining stumps.  Her neighbor, a young girl named Madeleine runs over and announces that they are neighbors and since they are both girl, they will be friends (it sounds wonderfully eighteenth century).  Madeleine exudes ignorance, she says that she thought that the tree stumps were “part of the ground.  Like rocks or something.”  But Stella quickly susses out that Madeleine is not stupid, but she seems to project ignorance as part of a kind of defense mechanism.  They quickly become friends and start a kind of tree cult in the back yard–praying to and offering small sacrifices to the gods of the trees.  Until school starts and they go separate ways.

About midway through the story we learn that Stella’s mother is pregnant (which is a shock to Stella).  And this rather changes the dynamic in the house.  Especially later, when she goes to the hospital to have the baby.  Nor and Stella, who are combative at best, find themselves sharing space alone.  They are civil, he even makes dinner for her (which she admits was quite a progressive thing for a man to do back then), but there is still a strange hostility

As the story draws to a close, they have just finished dinner and she is doing her homework.  She is increasingly frustrated by a math problem and reluctantly asks for Nor’s help. He has trouble with it as well, and things get heated between them.  The scene escalates into what could have gone in a very unsavory direction (when coffee is spilled on her skirt and she removes it to let it dry–I’ve been watching the British show Shameless, so my mind is a bit in the gutter).  But I was delighted that Hadley went in the opposite direction.  She uses this potentially awful moment to propel the story in a new direction altogether–a cooly positive direction that brings in the title and really makes the story wonderful.