Tony Stamp assesses the ninth album from Glaswegian post-rockers Mogwai.
Mogwai Photo: supplied
When you’re a band that helped define a genre, then stuck around for a quarter of a century, it must be tough to keep things surprising. Spare a thought then for Mogwai, the Glaswegian, mostly-instrumental post-rockers, who seem to grapple with that problem every album.
The good news is that they’ve reteamed with super-producer Dave Fridmann, and their latest, Every Country’s Sun, manages to sound fresh in a way they haven’t in years.
Every Country's Sun Photo: supplied
Opening track ‘Coolverine’ is a good example of the band not reinventing the formula, but coming up with new variations on it.
The song revolves around a handful of chords and the jazz-inflected drumming of Martin Bullock, but where the Mogwai of decades ago would have exploded into plumes of guitar distortion, the band and Fridmann settle for introducing a new bass line and a ride cymbal, to similarly euphoric effect.
Track two, ‘Party in the dark’, might be the most surprising moment on the album, in that it’s the most ‘pop’ influenced song the band has ever done.
They‘ve flirted with this kind of thing in recent years, but this is the most classically structured they’ve been, including lead vocals from guitarist Stuart Braithwaite, and an honest-to-god chorus. The title ‘Party in the Dark’ refers to an actual party, and isn’t a comment on parliamentary politics as you might expect.
Likewise, ‘Every Country’s Sun’ isn’t a treatise on shared resources, but a reference to a friend of the band’s who apparently thought every country literally had its own sun.
Mogwai often give their songs flippant titles like this, which can be a nice counterbalance to some of the more sombre music, such as the dirgey haze of ‘Brain Sweeties’. It has Fridmann’s fingerprints all over it. He’s not afraid to douse live drums with distortion, or any instrument for that matter.
And his hands-on approach could go some way to making up for the absence of guitarist John Cummings, who left the band just prior to recording this album. Guitars still abound though, with keyboard player Barry Burns and bassist Dominic Aitchison chipping in on several songs.
But there are also moments like ‘aka 47’, where the band follows its minimalist impulses into delicate new areas. It’s definitely a Mogwai track, but the main influence seems to have come from Jean Michel Jarre and his 70s synth contemporaries.
It’s a tonal palette that reappears on the album’s centrepiece ‘Don’t Believe the Fife’. The song swings between grim electronics and an outro that sees the band at their most anthemic.
Switching from quiet to loud has been a Mogwai trademark since their first songs, an aural dichotomy which mirrors the Mogwai/ Gremlin dynamic from the 1980s movie that gave the band their name. But here again it’s approached with a fresh palette, layering on slabs of noise rather than just hitting the distortion pedal.
The final third of the record sees the band in full guitar-hero mode, particularly on ‘Battered At A Scramble’, in which they channel Gish-era Smashing Pumpkins with such specificity that it seems like it must be deliberate. It also allows frontman and guitarist Stuart Braithwaite to unleash his inner shredder.
Every Country’s Sun is Mogwai’s ninth album, not a lot for a band in their third decade, but appropriate given that each one has been an album with a capital ‘A’, laden with gravitas.
They’ve flirted with soundtrack work more and more in recent years, which has resulted in more exploratory song structures and textures.
They’ve also marginally softened in older age, and refined their knack for emotive hooks. But they still retain the punky edge that set them apart from the post rock pack, and which ensures their dominance as the best purveyor of the form.
Every Country’s Sun is available on Temporary Residence
