Last year saw Mogwai release their eagerly anticipated ninth studio album, Every Country’s Sun via their own Rock Action Records in vinyl, CD and digital formats.
The record is their first studio album since 2014’s Rave Tapes, and sees them reuniting with producer Dave Fridmann for the first time since 2001’s acclaimed ROCK ACTION LP; Fridmann also worked with the band on Come On Die Young (1999).
It was recorded at Fridmann’s Tarbox Road Studios in Cassadaga, New York.
The opening track from the record, Coolverine, is available to stream and download from today. Buy / stream Coolverine: www.mogwai.co.uk
Pre-order Every Country’s Sun: www.mogwai.co.uk
Every Country’s Sun track list
- Coolverine
- Party In The Dark
- Brain Sweeties
- Crossing The Road Material
- aka 47
- 20 Size
- 1000 Foot Face
- Don’t Believe The Fife
- Battered At A Scramble
- Old Poisons
- Every Country’s Sun
Every Country’s Sun takes two decades of Mogwai’s signature, contrasting sounds – towering intensity, pastoral introspection, synth-rock minimalism, DNA-detonating volume – and distills it, beautifully, into 56 concise minutes of gracious elegance, hymnal trance-rock, and transcendental euphoria. It’s a structural soundscape built from stark foundations up; from a gentle, twinkling, synth-rock spectre to a solid, blown-out, skyward-thrusting obelisk. There’s percussive, dream-state electronics (Coolverine), church organs as chariots of existential fire (Brain Sweeties), tremulous, foreboding bleeping – possibly from a dying android (aka 47).
Their most transportive album yet, it also hosts their most fully realised art-pop sing-along of their storied history, Party In The Dark, a head-spinning disco-dream double-helix echoing New Order and The Flaming Lips. This is music as a keep-out chrysalis, protective audio armour through exalting organs and portentous, dissonant guitar fuzz warping at the edges, bending the world inside-out into a reality in which you’d much rather live. The last three songs ascend into explosive exorcism,closing with the colossal title track, its searching intensity whooshing towards infinity in a dazzling cosmic crescendo.
Mogwai are:
Dominic Aitchison (bass)
Stuart Braithwaite (guitar, vocals)
Martin Bulloch (drums)
and Barry Burns (keyboard, computer, guitar)
Formed in Glasgow in 1995, and their output numbers eight studio albums, 13 EPs, two remix albums, two live albums and four compilation albums including 2015’s collection Central Belters. They’ve also contributed soundtracks to an impressive spectrum of cinematic releases (both full soundtracks and contributions): alongside Atomic (a Top 20 UK album in 2016), there’s been consistent acclaim for projects including French TV series Les Revenants (2013) and contributions to Leonardo DiCaprio’s climate change documentary Before The Flood (2016) alongside Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross.
Special guests include The Twilight Sad.
Main image: Brian Sweeney
