It would be easy to slip into the mode of citing MOGWAI’s entire
discography, highlighting every shift and development in sound from one album to the next. But most reviews of their new album “Mr Beast” seem to have taken this angle, and let’s be honest, longstanding fans probably don’t need this W&H hackster telling them what they already know.
Suffice to say, this album (unsurprisingly) doesn’t go beyond the vast and heady heights of their debut album “Young Team”, but why would it? And why should it for that matter? It certainly doesn’t disappoint – in fact to the contrary this is a fucking brilliant album – mixing bone-crushing loudness with delicate, soothing melancholy, and even the odd speck of romanticism in there to boot.
So yep, we’ve still got the ‘Loud/soft/hard/quiet” format on the tracks, but it’s great cause it scare’s the living daylights out of you when you’re least expecting it. You’re lying in bed, waiting for the bogeyman to jump out of the cupboard, but instead you get an army of JCBs followed by a flock of angels with tubs of soothing Sudocrem. Confusing? Of course - why else would we love ‘em so much?
The album opens with ‘Auto Rock’, based around a simple piano line, which is ambient enough to start with, but rapidly builds into a colossal death march, densely packed with huge amounts of distortion, enough guitars to induce a brain haemorrhage, and the heavy, consistent bang-bang-bang of the big bass drum becoming louder and harder as the song progresses, culminating in a dizzying out-of-control spectacle of epic proportions. This leads into the gloriously monolithic “Glasgow Snake Monster” [reportedly about a theoretical rollercoaster system that transports commuters around Glasgow]. It’s scary, violent, and heavy. Mogwai clearly know how it’s done.
In contrast, the somewhat innocuously named ‘Acid Food’ is deliciously calming (must be the pedal steel, it’s the audio equivalent of cat-nip), whereas ‘Travel Is Dangerous’ is more of a typical Shoegazer effort; that is until the chorus kicks in and your ears are throbbing again.
|
‘Friend of the Night’ is divine, and for me is probably the highlight of the album (apart from ‘Auto Rock’ - that one terrified me). The melody is redolent of traditional Scottish folk music, and it swings like a gigantic pendulum across the vast audio landscape that Mogwai are veterans in creating. The guitars soar over the simple piano lines, the drums continue to have the life thrashed out of them, it’s completely beautiful. And true to form, the track afterwards, ‘Emergency Trap’, is quiet and touching - possibly one of the more poppy instrumentals on the album, being more accessible, and slightly “1-4-5”, but still beautiful nonetheless.
“I Chose Horses” features narrative from Tetsuya Fukagawa (Japanese hardcore band, Envy) and keyboards from Craig Armstrong. I don’t speak Japanese, but I don’t care what he was saying – the end result sounds deeply romantic and I just swooned my way towards the end of song. Wonderful. The final song ‘We’re No' Here’ typically drips with melodrama and pathos, and again has more loud guitars and drums than you would care to shake a stick at.
So there you have it. Mr Beast. Ear-bleeding, loud, frantic, dramatic, melodramatic, confusing, I am a Thesaurus. You really need to hear it for yourself, it’s marvellous.
|
