What happens when post-rock becomes merely post? This is a dilemma confronting Mogwai, once frontiersmen of sonic extremity, now your third favourite band from the ‘90s.
Fashion will eventually turn its back on everything of course, even highbrow avant-rock. In a scene overrun by Arctic Monkeys and clappy happy Talking Heads pastiche, who can find room to care for doomy, discordant, self consciously difficult music?
One person, at least, is wildly excited by Mogwai’s return – Alan McGee, the quintet’s recently appointed manager. The former Creation boss has been relentlessly hyping Mogwai’s forthcoming long player; Mr Beast, he proclaims, could just be the Glaswegians’ masterpiece, an art-pop marvel to rival My Bloody Valentine’s Loveless.
McGee’s enthusiasm might cause one to query his familiarity with the Mogwai songbook. Without question, Mr Beast is a slavering pit-bull of an album, stacked high with pile-driver riffs and churning, snarling lurches of feedback.
Yet rather than signifying a new departure, the LP harks back to an earlier Mogwai, the melancholy noiseniks of 1995’s Young Team.
Crashing from your stereo in ardent waves, Mr Beast exorcises the prissy touches of later Mogwai albums, which often relegated guitars in favour of pianos, strings and – careful now – proper singing.
For the first date of the Mr Beast tour, Mogwai fetch up in brisk, combative mood. Building from a few strummed chords to a stomach-flipping howl of treated guitars, the band push to the limit accepted notions of what rock music should sound like
For 90 minutes Mogwai deliver a succession of volcanic instrumentals, songs that stagger from near silence to barrages of unadulterated noise.
Sometimes, they will throw a curve ball. New single ‘Friend Of The Night’ begins with a plucked folk chord; during ‘Helicon 1’ three keyboard players pound their instruments while guitarist Stuart Braithwaite diffidently slashes his fret-board. Together, they conjure a glorious and oddly beguiling racket.
A keening, shrieking ‘Mogwai Fear Satan’ closes the set; layered guitars crackle and moan, like sheet lightening contemplating its mortality. Trembling in the shadow of the song, something chilling seems to seep through the listener, a cocktail of ice-water and awe.