MOGWAI 'Young Team'

MOGWAI's first full-length album, 'Young Team' was greeted by the music press with the kind of frenzied hysterical praise that's normally reserved for, well, not a gang of teenage instrumentalists. Their ranks briefly augmented by ex-Teenage fanclub drummer and Macrocosmica alumni Brendan O' Hare, MOGWAI entered Chem19 studios with Delgados drummer Paul Savage at the controls and carved out an album of bi-polar brilliance: delicately beautiful one-minute and pulverisingly loud the next. 'Young Team' remains one of the most ludicrously confident and wilfully abstract debuts in years - completely flying in the face of what was considered 'popular' at the time, it's an album that, crucially, hasn't seemed to date one bit: the ambition is matched by the execution and it's absolutley bereft of contrivance. Timeless, important, music. Plain and simple.