Arriving early December
Double CD
Who saw this coming - that very rockist notion of a career retrospective for that most anti-rockist of acts. But then Mosquitoes were never ones to play it how you might have imagined. Put together by Australian shop/label Repressed - another surprising turn for a London-based act but one that displays the appeal of their unmoored sound - 2014 Complete 2021 collects the entire recorded history of the band across two CDs, providing a thrilling reminder of just how fried and alive they truly were. It proves a bittersweet affair, too, as while there's plenty of music here, culled from a series of releases for a variety of underground labels, including Ever/Never, I Dischi Del Barone, Feeding Tube, Alter and Digital Regress, as well as our very own (happy to be keeping such esteemed company), you can't help but think there was a good deal still left in the tank. Listening back to their work as a whole, what I find most engaging is their very unique union of the musical and the non-musical. You can work out the origins of some of this noise, the rest can feel more alien, a confluence of static, hiss, drone and metallic clang that actually ended up playing pretty true to their name. Theirs was a pursuit of sound rather than song, and definitely in part driven by the autodidactic spirit of post-punk (by which i mean, say, Cold Storage or No New York, not the 2022 6Music playlist), yet you can't get to such a singular identity without having a very adept understanding of sonics, of how things might sit together even when it doesn't make much conventional sense. Mars, This Heat, The Dead C, even Twin Infinitives period Royal Trux might make sense as references points, but Mosquitoes don't exactly sound like those acts - we're clearly talking more of a shared understanding. Bands like Mosquitoes tend to either burn up hard and bright, or otherwise go on forever. All things considered, seven years and a double CD feels like a pretty substantial run that still leaves us with a sense of something left unsaid. In that sense, 2014 Complete 2021 proves a definitive victory.
