Album review: Rave Tapes by Mogwai

The group's eighth album features an increased emphasis on electronic elements, but some of the dirge-like songs can get strength-sapping.

Barry Burns of Mogwai on stage during ATP Festival in London last year. Photo by Gary Wolstenholme / Redferns via Getty Images

Rave Tapes Mogwai (Rock Action / Sub Pop) ⋆⋆⋆

Instrumental post-rock isn’t the easiest of sells, but Mogwai’s on-going success in the soundtrack world has helped fund their prolific album output. The Glaswegian quintet’s uncompromising music underpinned the rated supernatural drama series The Returned, and in 2013, they revisited their 2007 soundtrack for Zidane: A 21st-Century Portrait, the band performing live with the acclaimed football documentary screening behind.

Rave Tapes was recorded at the band’s Castle Of Doom studio in Glasgow last summer, and written in Glasgow and Berlin (the keyboard player Barry Burns lives in the German city, which has such a magnetic pull on musicians). Like 2003’s Happy Songs for Happy People, the title of Rave Tapes is typically mischievous; there are no floor-fillers here. Its familiar Mogwai tropes include zero-gravity electric guitar arpeggios, the odd snatch of cryptic lyrics and lovingly tweaked sonic carnage, but there’s also an increased emphasis on electronic elements, hence the opener Heard About You Last Night begins in ambient territory, all Zen-like bells.

If the sinister Remurdered and piano-and-birdsong-imbued Blue Hour exemplify the effortlessly filmic nature of Mogwai’s music, the talking point is probably the arch curio Repelish, which samples dialogue from a Christian radio show’s disparaging deconstruction of Led Zeppelin’s most famous song. “She says she’s ‘Buying a stairway to heaven’,” says the radio show’s host, taking Robert Plant’s lyric literally. “We know that’s not possible.”

Elsewhere, Simon Ferocious begins with a little synthesiser motif reminiscent of the tone-bursts that used to play at the start of albums available on cassette, then reminds us that there can be a fine line between post-rock and prog-rock. Rave Tapes is masterful, but the dirge-like Deesh; No Medicine for Regret and The Lord is Out of Control, can be a little strength-sapping. Mogwai will no doubt continue to attract the patronage of film-makers in search of distinctive-sounding soundtrack material, but milkmen in search of tunes to whistle will continue to look elsewhere.