That Hawk Is Doing Something

The Hawk Is Howling
Mogwai
Matador/Wall Of Sound, 2008
4 stars

After 2006’s hot-and-cold Mr Beast, this album is a return to form for the Scottish post-rock heroes. Once again they’ve tried to combine their ruggedly beautiful slow-burners with flat-out guitar tracks, but this time they’ve got the mix just about right. Batcat shows that these guys haven’t lost their love of insanely loud guitar noise, but the following tracks, the beautiful Danphe And The Brain and Local Authority, also shows their understanding of light and shade - the treatment of which, on this record, is fantastic. The gradual build of opener I’m Jim Morrison, I’m Dead (which brags one of the finest song titles of the year) shows that this band are back at the top of their game. Mogwai usually work best when they pick a style and stick to it for an entire album - their Zidane soundtrack was a superb example of this - but here they’ve made an album that covers the whole gamut of their sound without sacrificing a thing.

Artwork: B+
The liner notes to this album credit the cover and inside artwork to someone called Yahua's Thinking Studio, citing a couple of old eBay item numbers as reference. Whether this means that they bought the artworks (and, therefore the rights to print thousands and thousands of copies of them) from some unsuspecting Mr Yahua, or something else, I don't know - Google's letting me down on this one. What I do know, however, is that I really like it. That cover image is really good, in a kind of shit way. I love it when people paint or draw really intense things, like pets or landscapes or, here, birds.

Published in mX, Thursday October 30, 2008.