Mogwai - Friend of the Night
PIAS Recordings – PIASX064CDS - 30/01/06
By Sam Brokenshaw
The first cut to be made publicly available from the new
Mogwai album
"Mr Beast",
"Friend of the Night" would seem an odd choice to precede an album which is apparently a lot more rawk than recent
Mogwai output has tended to be. Now
Mogwai are probably not a band the average Ultimate Metal reader would regularly listen to, but recommend them I shall, due to their steadfast excellence in the post/art rock field.
The single is an exercise in simple melodic flavours and colours, similar to their peers such as
Mono et all. Lilting piano and guitars swoon over a solid rhythm section, creating an atmosphere mixing hope and melancholy in equal measure. The sum of this atmosphere is something akin to latter
Godspeed You Black Emperor! or the aforementioned
Mono. The songwriting on offer here swoons and dives with an uncanny grace, once again underlining
Mogwai's rare excellence in a genre often crammed with imitators and plagiarists offering nothing at all. At risk of repeating myself, I'll say that the regular UM reader is unlikely to have naturally embraced
Mogwai, but the more avant-garde of us can do no wrong by checking out this often unfairly maligned band.
9/10*
*
Replace extreme music with music, period.
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The Official Mogwai Website
PIAS Records Official Website
