Glasgow's post-rock powerhouse Mogwai loves you and is going to blow up your school. They had nothing to prove with this release - 2006's Mr. Beast showed that they were pretty great, even when on autopilot. However, they then decided to team up with their old producer Andy Miller (who helped make Young Team one of the best things about 1997) and went for broke. There's a lot of similarity in the flow of this album to Mr. Beast - hard rocking to epic rocking to soft rocking to more epic rocking - except there isn't that downtime in the middle that you usually skip over. The slower songs here like "Scotland's Shame" are well-written attempts at recording what can only be described as expansive music. Song titles (of otherwise lyric-free compositions) don't disappoint either; just take "I'm Jim Morrison, I'm Dead" and the aforementioned "I Love You, I'm Going To Blow Up Your School."
Beyond loving their titles, it's hard to describe a personal connection to music like Mogwai's. You want to just go, "Wow, this should be every movie soundtrack ever!" but that's not a very astute observation. Something better might be to comment on the band's exquisite building and releasing of tension in their songs and over the course of the album. You could even say that "Batcat" and "The Precipice" are two of Mogwai's finest efforts to date, helping make the album a genre-defining goldmine. But then you might be over-analyzing the situation; you'd be missing the really visceral connection you should be making between yourself, the music and these five Glaswegian magicians.
