By the time of Come On Die Young, the band had dived headfirst into a sound that defined them and created their myth in real time. CODY as it’s affectionately known to us heads, with bass player Dominic Aitchison demonically possessed on the cover, opens with Iggy Pop’s thoughts on Punk Rock before gracefully peeling into the title track. Come On Die Young is just so focussed- everything is perfect on this record. Coming two years after the sprawling Mogwai Young Team, here was the band’s original quintet distilled, crystallised. Stuart Braithwaite, Martin Bulloch, John Cummings, Barry Burns and Aitchison together with long-standing producer Dave Fridmann began a run of recordings and music making that resonated globally, soundtracking the dying embers of the 20th Century with beauty and a foreboding that pre-saw the anxiety of the 21st. The tracks are edited to perfection while managing to still sound spacious, drawn out, sometimes physically pressured with the weight of the world. On Come On Die Young, Mogwai drew more on the spidery compositions of Slint, with slower paced tracks that often eschewed the quiet VERY LOUD dynamics they had completely made their own. It adds up to a cohesive, highly emotive and stimulating atmosphere that for many of us became their early defining statement. It’s perhaps this brave new territory for the band, not reliant on the big distorted pay off, that meant it took critics a while to come round to the album and wean themselves off the band’s previous modus operandi. Tracks like May Nothing But Happiness Come Through Your Door brim with melancholy menace, while the CODY version of EP blaster Christmas Steps builds a fortress of tension and release for those craving that. Really though, this was the group at an early peak, one of many to come. CODY proved that this was a band for life, a group worth investing your mind and heart into.

24 years after its initial release, Mogwai’s iconic second album ‘Come On Die Young’ is to be reissued on coloured vinyl. Presented in a gatefold sleeve with original artwork, the white vinyl will come with a digital download code.

Originally released in March 1999, ‘Come On Die Young’s artwork references The Exorcist and a title scalped from a well-known Glasgow gang slogan. Instead of the cover’s suggested apocalypse-harbouring, pre-millennial assault on the senses however, this second offering from the band was a darkly elegiac – and surprisingly restrained – response to the aural fireworks of their ‘Young Team’ debut from two years earlier.

Tracklisting:

Punk Rock

Cody

Helps Both Ways

Year 2000 Non-Compliant Cardia

Kappa

Waltz For Aidan

May Nothing But Happiness Come Through Your Door

Oh! How The Dogs Stack Up

Ex-Cowboy

Chocky

Christmas Steps

Punk Rock/Puff Daddy/Antichrist