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Is life easier, or more difficult, for an instrumental band? On the one hand you don’t have the pressure to come up with an original subject and a list of non-cheesy words to describe it for every new song, thereby avoiding the risk of ruining a perfectly good tune with a terrible set of lyrics.
However, with that silver lining comes a couple of distinctly heavy-looking clouds. Firstly, you can’t just dream up ten seconds of a catchy riff, scribble down a few lyrics and hang a whole song around it; you need ten or eleven interesting melodies, and a way to mesh them together, before you’ve got anything approaching a whole song. Bands have built whole careers on less. And secondly, once you’ve managed to cobble a few melodies together, you can’t rely on singing about different subjects over essentially the same backing track in order to build a back catalogue. Again, bands have made whole careers...
It takes only one run through of ‘Hardcore Will Never Die, But You Will’, Mogwai’s seventh album, however, to realise that the Scottish band seem to have little trouble negotiating their way through whatever problems might exist. Never straying far from the stall they set out back in 1997 with ‘Young Team’, their debut, and yet still managing to sound as fresh and up to date as ever, Mogwai’s gentle nudging at the boundaries of their genre has maintained their standing at the top of the post-rock instrumentalist landscape for over a decade, and ‘Hardcore...’ looks like doing nothing to jeopardise that position.
Opener ‘White Noise’ is a crystallisation of the genre, a hypnotising, repetitive piano motif which seems to grow larger and smaller as the music behind it swells and recedes. ‘Mexican Grand Prix’ is where the boundary-nudging begins, featuring the electronic beats of the sort of indie dance crossover track that wouldn’t sound out of place on a Metronomy record.
Contrast is everything on ‘Hardcore...’ and so ‘Rano Piano’s sinister black sludge sloshes through the underground sewers before pouring out into the fragrant, jingly hopefulness of the misnomered ‘Death Rays’ which follows.
Later, ‘George Square Thatcher Death Party’ is one of few Mogwai tracks to contain vocals throughout, but while with a title like that you’d give your eye teeth to know what the song is about, true to form the lyrics are so heavily synthesised that it’s impossible to make out the storyline.
The ying and yang continues to the end of the record, ‘Letters To The Metro’ being as gentle a Mogwai Track as you’re likely to find, while album closer ‘You’re Lionel Richie’ re-imagines the shiny-haired 80s soul-pop crooner as a raging monster thrashing around in the deep. Quite how they made that leap is anyone’s guess.
With song titles that let the imagination of the listener create the subject matter for themselves, and a set of finely balanced material that is as refreshing as when they first arrived on the scene, ‘Hardcore Will Never Die, But You Will’ confirms that Mogwai’s titanic stature is as well deserved as ever.
