I recently picked up a copy of Mogwai's mammoth career-spanning compilation Central Belters. While listening to it, I was reminded of just how much I loved the band's Happy Songs for Happy People album when it was released a dozen or so years ago.
It's probably my favourite Mogwai album, and I reviewed it for another site at the time. It's a fairly rudimentary review, but I still feel exactly the same about the album today:
Happy Songs for Happy People is an album that takes me places I’d seldom otherwise go. Happy meets sad. Manic meets melancholy. Feeling upbeat and downbeat, warm and cold, both comfortable and uncomfortable, all at the same time.
Tripping ...
Panoramic moments of clarity, copious portions of fuzz. Sparse piano leads and interludes, crashing cymbals, and walls of guitar. Go there, you may like it.
Probably the best and most consistent offering from one of the most under-rated (of the many) Glasgow bands to emerge in the Nineties. Dig the metallic silver packaging, man.
Rave Tapes is the eighth full-length offering
from Scottish post-rockers Mogwai, and while it provides plenty of reference
points to the band’s past work, this album feels like a slight departure,
with Mogwai embracing electronic elements like never before.
17 years on from the wall-of-guitar tensions
of the raw debut, Young Team, the band is now approaching middle age, and
beyond the soundtrack stuff, there’s perhaps been a sense of stagnation about
its most recent work. I think Mogwai peaked around a decade ago, with the Happy
Songs For Happy People album being a highpoint in terms of my own personal
appreciation. And although the more recent The Hawk Is Howling had some fine
moments too (not least ‘Scotland’s Shame’), I’ve struggled to remain committed to
a band that more or less sounds the same on each new release.
But Rave Tapes offers something more.
Plus there’s a little more of the same old same old, for those hardcore fans.
The vast majority of Mogwai’s best moments have come on what might be called “instrumental”
tracks and once again Rave Tapes doesn’t deviate too far from that formula,
with seven out of the album’s ten tracks containing no vocals at all.
But where guitar might once have been the
most prominent feature of the band’s signature sound, Rave Tapes finds Mogwai
experimenting a little more with electronic stuff – keyboards, old synth
noodlings, and the tension in the music this time stems from its bass-driven
pulse, not the cascading guitars of the past. Album stand-out ‘Remurdered’ is
probably the most obvious example of that shift in focus.
Of course there’s still a lot of guitar,
Rave Tapes wouldn’t be a Mogwai album without it, it’s just that it works as peripheral
support this time out, rather than providing a lead role.
‘Repelish’ is the first of the tracks to
feature vocals, and even at that they’re sampled, as our narrator discusses
classic rock, Led Zep’s ‘Stairway to Heaven’, and subliminal connections to “Satan”.
‘Blues Hour’, the second track with vocals, is largely a non event for me, while
the third, the closer, ‘The Lord Is Out Of Control’ is all about vocoderised ambience,
and it doesn’t really go anywhere (well, it does, it takes us to the end of the
album … but hey).
There’s some good stuff too though; ‘No
Medicine For Regret’ and ‘Mastercard’ rivalling ‘Remurdered’ as first choices for
the download option if you only wanted to extract a few specific tracks.
And as much as I adore *some* Eighties
kitsch, I’m not a fan of the album cover, which looks a little bit like it
might have been designed by a Year 10 technical drawing student … just sayin’.
I recently picked up a copy of Mogwai's mammoth career-spanning compilation Central Belters. While listening to it, I was reminded of just how much I loved the band's Happy Songs for Happy People album when it was released a dozen or so years ago. 
