Album Review

MOGWAI

The Hawk Is Howling

(Matador)

The closest Mogwai get to a vocal passage in The Hawk Is
Howling is in a rare poppy song, “The Sun Smells Too Loud.” It’s
punctuated with a repeating lead-guitar blast whose tone recalls
Ratatat’s, acting as the song’s squawking bird. And the rest of the
track is just as rock-dancey, from the live drums that recall an 808 to
the harsh, organlike synth rounding out the track’s breakdown.

It’d be a shocker of a Mogwai song if it weren’t wedged
between the band’s formulaic crescendo builds. Not that Hawk is
a total repeat of the band’s quiet-rising-quiet-LOUD legacy, as they
take strides to perform more like the other huge Euro band lumped into
the unfortunate “post-rock” moniker, Sigur Rós. Opener “I’m Jim
Morrison, I’m Dead” makes this plainly clear, marrying a major-key
piano refrain with bowed chords that hang like a haze, while meandering
interludes like “Kings Meadow” are peppered with plucked strings and
chimes. But even this approach succumbs to the expected schedule of
when a crescendo will hit in a given song, like four-fifths of the way
through “Daphne and the Brain” and four-fifths into “I Love You, I’m
Going to Blow Up Your School.”

The journey en route is enjoyable enough—it always is. Whether
Mogwai’s multiple guitars are colliding in hard-rocker “Batcat” until
their rich, song-ending explosion, like a broken egg over-easy, or
trading off feedback squeals and note-
picking precision in the
no-
climax builder “Scotland’s Shame,” the band’s guitar maestros
prove they know their shit. One should hope so; Mogwai have been here
so many times before.