Mogwai "The Bad Fire" (2025)

The Bad Fire

release date: Jan 24, 2025

format: digital (10 x File, FLAC)

[album rate: 3,5 / 5] [3,68]

producer: John Congleton

label: Rock Action - nationality: Scotland, UK

Track highlights: 1. "God Gets You Back" - 2. "Hi Chaos" - 4. "Fanzine Made of Flesh" - 6. "If You Find This World Bad, You Should See Some of the Others" - 7. "18 Volcanoes" - 9. "Lion Rumpus"

11th studio album by Scottish band Mogwai following four years after As the Love Continues (Feb. 2021) sees a turn to hot producer name of John Congleton (Lana Del Rey, The Killers, Sharon Van Etten, Modest Mouse, St. Vincent,... to name a few) - a name that, imo, doesn't appear as a natural first choice, but hey, the band, or the managers may have thought they were in need of a distribution hack (?). Perhaps, Dave Fridmann didn't have the time? I think Fridmann have proved that he suits the band really really well, and he has always been a guarantee of a prominent production.

Compared to the excellent 2021 album, it's not a completely different release but it does feel like an inferior collection of compositions where the usual wide span has been narrowed in - confined - restricted, and the end result is of something where there's definitely steam but not enough coal to make the difference. The exceptions are "Hi Chaos", which sounds more like a left-over bonus track from the '21-album and "Fanzine Made of Flesh", which is the closest the band has been to switch to indie pop.

The Bad Fire is not a poor album and far from it, but after such a great achievement it does feel as inferior. What I miss here is a stronger direction - what is it really? It's obvious that the band has come a long way since Come on Die Young (1999) and that synths have by now become a more integral part of the band's primary instrumentation but where As the Love Continues showcased a fine mix that allowed for guitars to be fully heard side by side or together with huge electronic arrangements, this new outing sort of blends everything into one huge pot where new boundaries are no longer being pushed or new soil is investigated. To me, this is undoubtedly Mogwai, which means it can't be bad, and it never is. It's just that they sound like the music has been restricted from delivering as freely as it could.

Recommended.

[ allmusic.com, The Guardian, Mojo 4 / 5, Pitchfork 7,4 / 10, Rolling Stone, 👍PopMatters 3,5 / 5 stars ]

Kings of Leon "Can We Please Have Fun" (2024)

Can We Please Have Fun

release date: May 10, 2024

format: cd (2 cd) (Limited Edition)

[album rate: 3,5 / 5] [3,66]

producer: Kid Harpoon

label: LoveTap Records / Polydor - nationality: USA

Track highlights: Disc 1) 1. "Ballerina Radio" - 2. "Rainbow Ball" - 4. "Mustang" (live on the Tonight Show) - 5. "Actual Daydream" - 6. "Split Screen" - 9. "M Television"

Disc 2 - Live at Wrexham) 1. "Crawl" - 4. "On Call" - 5. "Find Me" - 6."Pyro" [ official audio concert ]

9th studio album by Kings of Leon following three years after When You See Yourself (Mar. 2021) is the band's first with British producer Kid Harpoon, who has previously worked with Harry Styles and especially has been welcomed as an acclaimed songwriter for his substantial work on Styles' album Harry's House (2022). The 2-disc limited edition has been titled in Welsh as Gawn Ni Hwyl Plîs, with reference to the live tracks stemming from a concert in Wrexham, Wales recorded at the Racecourse Ground, May 27 and 28, 2023.

My guess is that a big majority of Kings of Leon fans find the music by Harry Styles as more than a shortcut from that of the American band but I have come to understand this band as a unit who sees themselves in another light than I would intuitively. Working with producers like Angelo Petraglia & Jacquire King probably had many think of the band as a natural part of the alternative rock scene, but when turning to Markus Dravs on two consecutive albums, I think, it's quite clear that the band has other desires than 'just' representing pure rock, and Kid Harpoon (aka Thomas Edward Percy Hull) may perhaps be seen as a British-styled partner in crime to Dravs - narrowly speaking of course. But really, KoL is one of those bands - not far from The Killers - who stands with one foot heavy buried in dirty rock-mud and the other in sticky candy-flush. They started out as a psychedelic rock band and then experienced international fame when they jumped the pop-train, and ever since, they have kind of stood there with their feets in a limbo. Easy money and gigantic fame is hard to reject when your hobby becomes your job, and why on Earth would you? The disc 2 concert here shows the dilemma: concert goers scream and shout for their hits "Revelry", "On Call", "Find Me", and "Pyro", and they deliver. KoL is on their way to become the closest to an American version of U2, and they sail along on these streams 'cause that's all they can do. I would't be extremely surprised if they made a U-turn in the near future and made their Achtung Baby with some prominent producer-name and then spent the rest of their career jumping stepping stones to avoid the fogs of oblivion.

Meanwhile, Can We Please Have Fun is a solid and delightful collection of melodic uptempo pop / rock, which verifies how they have found their formula and also have refrained from past failures like Walls (2016) and Mechanical Bull (2012) that today appear as necessary attempts with sugary content as recipes that went too far off bulls eye.

Recommended.

[ allmusic.com, Rolling Stone, The Independent 4 / 5, Clash 3,5 / 5, Mojo, NME 3 / 5 stars ]

2-disc Limited Edition