Taken from their recent, critically-acclaimed “Mr.Beast” album, “Travel Is Dangerous” once again demonstrates why MOGWAI loom head and shoulders over the majority of the competition.
Although it’s difficult to deny the MBV comparisons whipped up by the track’s broiling cauldron of shoegaze-y ingredients, it’s a heady mix on its’ own terms and with the ‘Gwai’s multi-instrumentalist extraordinaire Barry Burns adding the great, obscene phone caller vocals, “Travel Is Dangerous” sounds every bit as lethal on its’ lonesome as it does on the parent album.
The EP is fleshed out by both a brace of remixes and live tracks from the band’s rapturously-received Japanese gigs back in January. The ERRORS remix of “Auto Rock” shoehorns in elements of Berlin-period Bowie and clinical Kraftwerk and is almost (whisper it) ambient in its’ execution, while the ACID CASUALS’ reworking of “Friend Of The Night” is chilled-out, eerie and very somnambulant indeed. The piano that drove the original version briefly resurfaces and at one stage a phone’ goes off to stir your from your torpor. It’s plangent and vulnerable, but still on edge even in this form.
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The live tracks, meanwhile, are simply Mogwai doing what they do best and doing it well. There’s a monolithic “Like Herod” which is still as doomy and atmospheric as hell, going from an ominous silence to that raging headfuck section which is still probably best described in terms of Lancaster bombers and controlled explosions. It’s taut, draining and magnificent, as is “We’re No’ Here”: the current Mogwai set-closer of choice which again flirts with ear-splitting feedback, mournful plangency and coiled atmosphere and reminds us once again that few can build their sonic cathedrals as breathtakingly as this lot even after all these years. (8)
(http://www.mogwai.co.uk )
(http://www.zianefilm.cine.wanadoo.fr/ )
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