In the almost fourteen years since their religiously cited debut album Young Team, Scottish post-rock pioneers Mogwai have released album upon album of consistently grandiose, shimmering, sometimes distorted and ugly, but always emotionally stirring instrumental guitar rock. Their sound has become so finely honed, in fact, that a casual listen to their latest release—the fantastically titled Hardcore Will Never Die, But You Will (in stores and online tomorrow)—won’t offer much in the way of evolution or deviation from their “simmer, build, peak” guitar rock formula.
What’s actually changed since 2008’s stylistically varied The Hawk Is Howling? Not too much, which isn’t a bad thing for them. Producer Paul Savage (The Delgados) gives the album a tightly focused, almost restrained sense of direction; with the exception of a gorgeously languid piano ballad called “Letters To The Metro”, the new Mogwai album builds off the group’s strengths, namely the complicated, usually overlapping countermelodies of guitarists Stuart Braithwaite, John Cummings, and Barry Burns. “White Noise” and “How To Be A Werewolf” are textbook retreads through the band’s classicist, jangly guitar sound: building up to lush, emotional peaks before gently cascading back into silence. Like most Mogwai records (and, by extension, nearly every post-rock band inspired by them), this one has the aesthetic rush of a forceful wave, peaking and subsiding in a beautiful rhythm of highs and lows, chaos and control.
Which isn’t to say that it’s a boring, monotonous listen—“San Pedro” blasts out of the gates with a fiery uptempo, surging assault of hissing punk rock power chords and the tightly precise, cymbal heavy bashing of drummer Martin Bulloch. “Mexican Grand Prix” is a welcome evocation of Krautrock-era European organ rock with its staccato chord changes and retro, wondrously lo-fi vocoder singing. The record’s late highlight is a heartbreakingly melancholic fireball called “Too Raging To Cheers”—like Nero overlooking the burning of Rome, the song’s mournful violin soars through an aggressive onslaught of guitar distortion and cinematic keyboard bombast. Sounding a bit like their classic debut, album closer “You’re Lionel Richie” (perfect, yeah?) establishes a warm bed of reverberating acoustic guitar finger picking before destroying everything with those trademark, larger than life power chords, booming and bellowing like the warring gods.
Mogwai haven’t reinvented the wheel on their seventh studio album, but Hardcore Will Never Die… is a powerful reaffirmation of their skills and rightly title as one of modern rock’s most unfailingly affecting and emotionally stirring groups.
Sum-ology: More of the same slow-building, emotionally soaring instrumental post-rock anthems… but nobody does it better than Mogwai.
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