Ten years on and Mogwai are still sniping at bands, and now journos, still touring, despite a considerable hiatus, still making albums, still sticking to the LOUD/quiet/LOUD formula to devastating effect and all importantly, still covertly vital.
It’s a welcome return and emotional check up that confirms, with or without a glass of red, Mogwai are still essential listening. Controversy aside, with a film score about everyone’s favourite footballing monk (Zinedine Zidane) on the horizon, there’s still forthcoming long player ’Mr Beast’ to contend with. It’s an album that sees the dramatics replaced by a new sense of epic. The dynamic’s been tweaked and melody's sifted through a cat flap as opposed to a serious of pin holes and allowed to flourish.
Like the soundtrack to 1000 montages, the initially tentative ‘Auto rock’ unfurls into an unwavering piano laden thumper before morphing into ‘Glasgow Mega Snake’ and is everything the title suggests. Well there’s a lack of snake I suppose but like Begbie after a few Special Brew, it’s an uncompromising effort that sees a familiar return to the epic trepidation of the ‘Mogwai fear satan’ design with a spiralling sound and thundering guitar crescendos. Stuart Braithwaite wholeheartedly takes to vocal duties for the lusciously anthemic ‘Travel is Dangerous’ whilst ‘Friend of the night’ ebbs and flows with sumptuously tumbling piano and the customary rise and fall patterning Mogwai have made their own.
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Whilst it’s still gloriously indulgent shoe gazing, it’s an album that demonstrates a new sense of determination typified by the epic, dramatic and apocalyptic ‘We’re no Here’. Like a cacophony of natural disasters, it’s a thrashing monster of a closer that’ll leave a stamping resonance in your memory and a ringing in your ears. Any previous tenderness and tranquillity is transcended in an instant and you’re reminded all over again just why you fell in love with this band.
Surpassing ’Happy Songs for Happy People’ was going to be a challenge but it’s one they’ve achieved with customary aplomb. Five albums in and the wit, intelligence and the music are still firing. Just ask FHM.
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