SAY Awards - Remember Remember - A Closer Look

It's been over three weeks since The SAY Awards Long List was announced and hopefully you've been busy familiarising yourself with the unknown quantities that it threw up.  As there's also now less than twenty four hours until the all important public vote, and with the winner of said vote guaranteed a place on the Short List of ten albums, there's a lot at stake (£10,000 to be precise!)  As one of the 100 nominators for the SAY Awards, we were chuffed to see four of our five selections make the Long List.  And we've decided to give you the low-down on each of these four albums.

That isn't to say that the other 16 albums are not worthy of your vote or being the overall winner.  Indeed there's plenty of other worthy contenders in our eyes, and we'll come to them in due course.  We all have our favourites and these four albums happen to be mine.  That said the most important thing is to make up your own mind and you can do that over at the SAY Awards official site.

Without further ado, here's the forth and final one of our choices, 'The Quickening' from Remember Remember.

Released on Mogwai's Rock Action Records on 26th September, the album is musically an orchestrated work of art.  Keeping the simple method of layering over a repeated beat, this time round, Graeme Ronald has added in fuller sounds by recruiting a band of instrumentalists to his side.  At it's peaks, of which there are many, the music soars high, even though there's a tinge of melancholy which was absent from Remember Remember's debut. This is music for grown ups.

Highlight's include the twinkling 'White Castle', the dark 'Scottish Widows' and closer 'John Candy' which brings a happier ending to an otherwise solemn album.

Why should 'The Quickening' win The SAY Award 2011?

This, ultimately, is the question that I had to ask myself when nominating the album, and one which you should ask when deciding to vote, or not vote, for it.  The answer?  I'm genuinely excited to see just what Graeme Ronald and his group of backing musicians create next.  I'm too young to properly remember Mogwai when they first came out back in 1997 but having listened to their back catalogue and transition into the premier post-rock Gods, Remember Remember excite me in the same way that fans of Mogwai must have been excited.  The vision and creativity of musicians like Remember Remember deserves to be nurtured, and free from record company pressures given time to bloom.  Winning The SAY Awards could allow the next masterpiece from Remember Remember to be made.


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