Arriving in March 1999 with an album cover that referenced The Exorcist and a title scalped from a wellknown Glasgow gang slogan, you’d have expected Mogwai’s Come On Die Young to be an apocalypseharbouring, pre-millennial assault on the senses. Instead, we were treated to a darkly elegiac – surprisingly restrained – response to the aural fireworks of their ‘Young Team’ debut from two years earlier.
• Recorded and mixed at Dave Fridmann’s Tarbox Road Studios in Upstate New York, Come On Die Young begins with a sample of Iggy Pop eulogising the genius of punk rock and ends with a track entitled ‘Punk Rock / Puff Daddy / Antichrist’. This thoughtful and irreverent diptych enclosed an hour of music that was as beautiful as it was blistering and as poignant as it was unpredictable: preconceptions of what to expect from a Mogwai album, disassembled at a stroke.
• ‘Come On Die Young’ was – and remains – a hugely accomplished, elegant and important album, setting a benchmark for the fierce intelligence that would characterise Mogwai’s future body of work.
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