Mogwai - Mr Beast on CD

Description

The fifth album from Mogwai should satisfy those fans who’ve feared their heroes might be losing their sharp-taloned gremlin edge. Mr Beast, you see, is a significant jerk of the volume knob--a record that finds these Scots avant-rockers sporadically reaching again for the same skull-crushing levels of sound that lent earlier albums like 1997s Young Team such noise-freak notoriety. The lessons in songcraft learnt on more recent works like Happy Songs For Happy People, however, have stuck: for every dials-in-the-red rocker like "Glasgow Mega-Snake" or "Were No Here", theres a more sedate moment like the Barry Burns-sung "Acid Food" or piano-accompanied "Friend Of The Night" to give the album a nice peaks-and-troughs feel. Theres a special guest too, in the shape of Tetsuya Fukagawa of Japan’s Envy, a hardcore outfit with clear similarities to Mogwais cacophonic sturm und drang. The surprise being, however, that the track in question, "I Chose Horses" is a soft, lilting keyboard number thats possibly this bands plain loveliest moment to date. Mr Beast’ is the band’s fifth album and the follow-up to 2003’s ‘Happy Songs For Happy People’. It was recorded in the band’s new Castle Of Doom studio in Glasgow between April and October 2005 with producer Tony Doogan. As the title suggests, this is a record of considerable size and weight - a monster creation that started out as a return to the heady, bone-crushing volume and intensity of earlier recordings, and then mutated into a many headed, many mooded beast. It opens with ‘Auto Rock’ - whose sweetly melancholic, central piano motif is gradually engulfed by a swell of fulsome guitars and pummelling drum beats - and closes with lurching, psych-rock behemoth ‘We’re No Here’. In between are eight future Mogwai classics, including the heads-down ‘Glasgow Mega-Snake’, where what must surely be a dozen guitars swarm around a molten metal core like crazed killer bees, the drum machine-driven country gospel of ‘Acid Food’, which features pedal-steel guitar, the wintry splendour of ‘Friend Of The Night’ and the impossibly poignant ‘I Chose Horses’, featuring guest vocalist Tetsuya Fukagawa (of Japanese hardcore band Envy) and a keyboard contribution from composer/arranger Craig Armstrong. Whether light and lean or dark and monstrous, however, these songs underline Mogwai’s belief that to have meaning, rock needs both mass and monumentality. If ‘Mr Beast’ has one thing, it’s presence.

Tracks

1. Auto Rock
2. Glasgow Mega Snake
3. Acid Food
4. Travel Is Dangerous
5. Team Handed
6. Friend Of The Night
7. Emergency Trap
8. Folk Death 95
9. I Chose Horses
10. We're No Here