Playlouder - Music is the Network

I first heard of Mogwai when a friend at school pressed a copy of 1997’s Young Team into my pubescent hands. He’d just been to New York for some reason (In those days of course, going to America was an ideal opportunity to buy lots of cheap CDs that you couldn’t easily get here). Alongside the early Limp Bizkit and the late Pavement, lurked the Scottish five pieces’ first album. Now, by this point I had firmly moved on from my Britpop worshipping, Definitely Maybe-“is like waking up to find the Taj Mahal in your back garden filled with Angel Delight”-agreeing, Select magazine-reading early teen-hood. Yet the most “out-there” thing I’d really enjoyed to date had been the Boo Radley’s excellent C’mon Kids.

Mogwai were different. The album began with a muffled recording of a girl mumbling "If someone said that Mogwai are the stars I would not object. If the stars had a sound it would sound like this...", and finished with 20 minutes of endlessly building guitar rage and delicate flute. It changed my musical landscape.

10 years later they’re still at it, still recognisably the same band, still increasingly honing their unique sound. All the different kinds of tracks they make are here: the majestic opener (I'm Jim Morrison I'm Dead), the pummelling metal-influenced rock actions (Batcat), and the fragile melodic drifts that provide the space that makes the album what it is (Kings Meadow). The Hawk Is Howling is a culmination of what has come before, but unlike 2006’s disappointing Mr Beast, lives up to the great expectations this inevitably entails.

The burbling electronic tone-colours of 2003's Happy Songs for Happy People interact with the taught precision brought to be bare on 1999's Come On Die Young, and this time it sounds right. Ever-present is the ambiguous Mogwai mood, its sad yearning beauty tempered by moments of joyful release and strident menace, once again igniting fires in the hearts of those who resonate with such frequencies. As always, there are stand out tracks that can be taken from the album’s careful sequence and repeated again and again. The glorious, effervescent and swaggering The Sun Smells Too Loud is one. The other is Scotland’s Shame.

This is my favourite flavour of Mogwai, the one that illuminated the transcendent New Paths To Helicon Part 1, the one that reverberated around Hunted By A Freak, the one that’s been there since Fear Satan.  It feels a bit like becoming one with the absolute and simultaneously experiencing all the carnage wrought by human civilisation. In slightly more prosaic terms it feels like the ultimate futility and beauty of the human experience are hitting you in the face right at the same time. Maybe it feels like something different to you, but on Scotland’s Shame the Glaswegian tracksuit-wearers have touched it again with their shimmering, ethereal synths, restrained slow-metal drumming, and tension inducing guitars. The hawk is howling, indeed.