Mogwai - The Rave Tapes

Can you have too much of a loud thing? That is the question raised by Mogwai’s very long, very decibel happy career. Once strikingly novel, today their sound is often ridiculed as a formula – soft, heavy, HEAVIER! – stretched and spun into forms that somehow always suggest variations on each other. Not for them the club to megadome career path of Sigur Ros or the unimpeachable cred of Godspeed You! Black Emperor. Rather, Mogwai have found dignity in repetition: vogues come and go, the zeitgeist slouches onwards, yet they remain unchanging, a fixed point amid the swirl.

Listening to the Glasgow outfit’s eighth record – not counting sundry film scores and remix projects – it’s obvious any navel-gazing over their reluctance to progress is strictly for the rest of us. They stick to what they know. Admittedly Rave Tapes does offer several variations on the core theme: there’s some interesting sampling, albeit of the American wacko variety pioneered by Godspeed You all of a decade and a half ago; the occasional nod towards electronica (presumably the ‘rave’ to which the title refers) and folk (or at least rollicking, plugged in post-folk). And yes, without question, it’s pristine Mogwai – less bleary and unfocused than 2008’s The Hawk Is Howling, upholstered with smarter tunes than Hardcore Will Never Die But You Will, from 2011. Ultimately, though, Rave Tapes add up to nothing more, or less, than another Mogwai LP.