With David Fridmann producing, the latest Mogwai album contains the same bratty conviction that defined their greatest records, like there’s something truly at stake.
Over the last decade-plus, Mogwai’s album-length scores and soundtracks have threatened to overshadow their official studio releases. The former—particularly Mogwai’s haunting contributions to both the BBC documentary “Atomic: Living in Dread and Promise” and the spooky French television drama “Les Revenants”—have managed to distill the Scottish band’s brute sonic force with surprising subtlety and grace. Increasingly, writing music as part of a collaborative project seems to suit these guys: Freed from the pressure to make big stand-alone album statements, Mogwai are able to relax and let over 20 years of post-rocking naturally guide their hand in the studio.
With the exception of 2011’s excellent, exploratory Hardcore Will Never Die, but You Will, Mogwai’s proper albums of late have lacked this deftness of touch. Spinning from the loud-quite-loud dirges of their early days to krautrock histrionics and brittle, analog electronics—missing the mark nearly as often as they hit it—the band has struggled to find a steady path forward. On Every Country’s Sun, their ninth LP, Mogwai find their center of gravity. Finally, these Glaswegians are having fun again, loosening up and dirtying up, but with purpose and fire.
You wouldn’t know this from the record’s lead singles. “Coolverine” and the rare vocal track “Party in the Dark” reprise many of the same themes from Mogwai’s recent records: chilly, midtempo electronics and New Order art-rock, respectively. “Party in the Dark,” however, is a raging success—an indie pop gem that fulfills the promise of the similarly shoegazey “Teenage Exorcists,” from the 2014 EP Music Industry 3. Fitness Industry 1. Guitarist Stuart Braithwaite’s vocals have never sounded more nakedly melodic.
But ultimately these tracks are textbook late-period Mogwai: distant, pensive, electro-curious but noncommittal. And this is true of much of the album’s first third. “Brain Sweeties” plods ambivalently through waves of scorched-earth synths and pounding drums, while “aka 47” bleeps and bloops its way into dystopian oblivion. Elsewhere, however, Mogwai sound like a new band, and in a sense they are: Now a quartet after the 2015 departure of longtime guitarist John Cummings, the band is leaner and meaner. “Battered at a Scramble” devolves into a pitched dogfight between a screeching organ, a fuzzed-out bass, and a rambling guitar solo, everything shoved far into the red—Mogwai’s version of the Velvet’s “Sister Ray.” “Old Poisons,” meanwhile, is a white-hot slab of pummeling noise-rock that recalls Mogwai at their most youthful and insouciant.
It’s tempting to chalk up this newfound band-in-the-room energy to the return of an old friend behind the boards. Dave Fridmannproduced and mixed Every Country’s Sun, the first time he’s worked with Mogwai since 2001’s Rock Action. And like that record, Sun is rich and warm and huge. “20 Size” is a single, shimmering hunk of resonant sound: Its electric guitars are close and real enough to touch, and the drums, too, are massive (this is a Fridmann record after all). Drummer Martin Bulloch is a guiding force throughout, pushing the pulsing title track to one of the most toweringly mournful conclusions in Mogwai’s recorded career.
Over the last decade, Mogwai have been dogged by the same essential questions: Have they managed, in any meaningful way, to move beyond the genre-defining guitarmageddons that defined their first records? And if so, have they said anything genuinely interesting? The answers are yes and yes, generally speaking. But the real question for any band two decades into their career—certainly one so closely associated with a singular sound—isn’t what they play but how they play it. And for at least half of their new record, Mogwai play—for the first time in years—with the same bratty conviction that defined their greatest records, like there’s something truly at stake. At its best, Every Country’s Sun is brash, gritty, unpretentious, and thrillingly claustrophobic—a work of volume and violence in tight spaces.
