Send "Mogwai " Ringtones to your Cell 
| Sputnikmusic |
 It’s quite the amazing thing, inspiration. It can appear in an endlessly vast variety of forms, through the unconscious and through reality, the spiritual and the corporeal. It can be brought about by birds in flight or beggars in subways, by the chill of winter or the heat of summer, by first loves or last goodbyes. It can be unwittingly shared by authors, musicians, actors and artists. It can be coaxed out of its stagnancy by a walk in the forest or a midnight run around the tall buildings of the city. Or it can appear out of the blue, unannounced and sometimes even inconveniently. Like when you’re buried deep in your work and suddenly you’re overcome by surges to create, but you know you don’t have time. It can keep you awake at night and get you out of bed in the morning. It knows of no bounds or prejudices, visiting the happiest and the saddest, the richest and the poorest. Sometimes it will even emerge from the violence of the thickest flames, like those of rage, resentment and despair. That last point should resonate especially heavily with Glaswegian post-rockers (don’t contend it anymore) Mogwai. It’s surely the reason for their status as one of post-rock’s most celebrated bands, one of the genre’s top dogs. Their debut album, Young Team, the album that got them and still gets them mounds of praise, attention and new followers, that album was born from the fires of contempt and hatred. That’s no secret. The band themselves claim it to be their worst album, created amongst the turbulent midst of arguments and fist-fights between the band members which threatened both their relationships with one another and the album that was to be their make-or-break opening statement. But what if it was that, in the heat of these disputes, inspiration erupted? What if those sparks of creativity and originality were spat out by the intense, almost destructive friction between band members? It’s a heat that certainly hasn’t been seen since, and has crept quietly out of the band with each succeeding album. Maybe I’m selfish, but sometimes I wish I could slip a whoopee cushion under Stuart’s chair and blame it on Dom just to get things fired up again. Thus, with five albums between Young Team and Hardcore Will Never Die, you could be forgiven for predicting a soullessly agreeable affair which ticks all the right post-rock boxes but still comes away sounding disenchanted and limp. And yet no one ever predicts it. Well, at the least they never want to. Myself included. We hope for the resurgence of catharsis and charisma, of immersion and intensity. But what do we get? Another ladling of cold, unsatisfying, glazed-over and over-glazed disappointments. What’s more, and this is a relatively new frustration, Hardcore Will Never Die is hard to enjoy even at a basic level because it appears that Mogwai are now playing behind a wall of glass. It’s not that it’s post-rock-by-numbers, although at times it really is, but more so that it doesn’t even sound like there are painters behind the palette. Lack of vocals are both a challenge and an opportunity to post-rock bands; it’s harder to project a personality onto music without the directness and identifiableness of a human voice and his words, but great post rock can transcend that reliance on vocals if they can trace their inspiration and humanity into the music. This deeply personal sound doubles as a comforting refuge when the same human voice becomes an irritable twang. But it does have to be deeply personal, and inspired: that’s where the warmth naturally rouses from. Hardcore, for the most part, sounds like it was recorded by men thinking about what to add to their shopping lists. What’s exposed is not the painful core of individuality, only the thin film of distraction....full text |
| Antiquiet |
| Judging by the name, one might imagine Mogwai’s latest, Hardcore Will Never Die, But You Will, was going to come from a post-rock band ready to embrace their punk influences, releasing a snarling beast of an album full of tunes waiting to reach into the ears and rip off the heads of all those not hardcore enough to heed its call. Instead, the band has released probably its most subdued yet; more focused on texture than energy. Mogwai uses the interplay of timbres as much as the melodies to make their effect, and the result is a richly nuanced album that, while lacking in the moments of unhinged glory the band specializes in, still packs an emotional wallop and an engaging listen from start to finish....full text |
| Streetdate |
| If you’re a die-hard fan of the Scottish post-rock group Mogwai, chances are you already got your free MP3 of “Rano Pano,” a lovely instrumental off the awesomely-titled forthcoming album Hardcore Will Never Die, But You Will set for release next year on Sub Pop Records. But for those unfamiliar with the vocal-less electronic leans of the group, dive in and give these guys a spin because heck — you only live once! The best way for us (and quickest) to introduce Mogwai to any fan of great music is to highly encourage them to watch a recent concert-film the band released earlier this year called Burning (more info here). Directed by Vincent Moon and Nathanael Le Scouarnac, the duo responsible for a similar type of musical movie magic they did for R.E.M. two years ago in Supernatural Superserious, the documentary faithfully captures the experience of the bands 2009 three-night run at Brooklyn’s Music Hall of Williamsburg....full text |
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