Welcome to the last official part of Mogwai Discographied. This entry covers their two newest releases: the 2011 album Hardcore Will Never Die, But You Will and the accompanying Home Demos EP. If you'd like to catch up, part one covers Ten Rapid and the 4 Satin EP, part two covers Young Team and Kicking a Dead Pig / Mogwai Fear Satan Remixes, part three covers the No Education = No Future (Fuck the Curfew) EP and Come on Die Young, part four covers the Mogwai EP and their entry in the Travels in Constants series, part five covers Rock Action and My Father My King, part six covers Happy Songs for Happy People and Government Commissions: BBC Sessions 1996-2003, part seven covers Mr. Beast, the singles for Friend of the Night, and Travel Is Dangerous, and the soundtrack for Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait, and part eight covers The Hawk Is Howling, the Batcat EP, and their live album Special Moves. Next time I'll wrap things up with album rankings and ephemera.

Hardcore Will Never Die, But You Will – Sub Pop, 2011

Highlights: “You’re Lionel Ritchie,” “Mexican Grand Prix,” “How to Be a Werewolf,” “Music for a Forgotten Future (The Singing Mountain)”

Low Points: “Rano Pano,” “White Noise”

Overall: Want to know why it’s so difficult to write about every Mogwai release? They’re too consistent. My least favorite of their full-lengths to date (Come on Die Young and Happy Songs for Happy People) are still good records in the grand scheme of things. Put those records against other post-rock records released in 1999 and 2003 and they’ll hold their own. Upon release, I’ve spun each Mogwai album countless times. They’re approachable, solid records. Barring unreasonable hype or the endless hope for a new “Mogwai Fear Satan,” you know what to expect and you get it.

In a large enough sample set, however, such predictability is exhausting. Aside from Kicking a Dead Pig / Mogwai Fear Satan Remixes, I can’t cite a single Mogwai release with a disastrous turn. The best I can do is nitpick: Come on Die Young drags in the middle; Happy Songs for Happy People and Mr. Beast lack transcendent highlights; Zidane is repetitive; “The Sun Smells Too Loud” doesn’t fit The Hawk Is Howling’s mood. Nitpicking is tedious. But that’s what you can do with a body of work that offers a consistent return by taking few risks.

I was spoiled, in a weird way, by the risks taken by Discographied’s first subject, Sonic Youth. Say what you will about NYC Ghosts & Flowers, but it’s not a retread of A Thousand Leaves. I didn’t care for The Eternal, but damned if it’s not a 180 from Rather Ripped. Each Sonic Youth record changed my perception of the group. I may have hated particular songs or releases, but they each offered something new to hear and write about.

Mogwai’s changed from album to album, but it’s never been drastic. They take measured risks—an increased reliance on electronics here, shorter song structures there—but nothing that threatens their core identity. They play it safe, bolstering their repertoire with more album highlights to add to their live set (not to mention 2018’s The Specialist Moves). Part of me itches for a NYC Ghosts & Flowers left-turn, whatever that might be. A Mogwai punk album. A Mogwai ambient album. A Mogwai stoner metal album. Doing something on a lark, even an EP of “Travel Is Dangerous”-style rock songs, would be greatly appreciated, even if it fails. Then they could go back to being Mogwai, that branded entity of rock-post-rock, and I’ll hear it with fresh ears.

Whether you have fresh ears will likely determine your enthusiasm for the superbly titled Hardcore Will Never Die, But You Will. Aside from one lengthy bonus track, it offers a few minor surprises, but is essentially a reassurance that Mogwai is good at being Mogwai. As a whole, it’s a hybrid of their last three albums, pulling Happy Songs’ electronic vocals, Mr. Beast’s concise rockers, and The Hawk Is Howling’s sense of space.

I was initially taken by the songs that deviated from the usual approach, most of which appear at the beginning of the album. Opener “White Noise” is a cosmopolitan update of “Auto-Rock,” bright colors and chipper melodies piloting its gradual ascent, but the song’s construction is the new touch. Much like Polvo’s “Beggar’s Bowl,” the foundational guitar loop in “White Noise” remains even as more layers are piled on. The Neu!-aping click track and programmed beat of “Mexican Grand Prix” signals a foray into Krautrock, but Luke Sutherland’s (of Long Fin Killie) hushed vocals overtake the digitized voices as Martin Bulloch kicks the song into gear. The fuzzed-out melody of “Rano Pano” feels like a different band (Mogwai favorites Bardo Pond?), but the new texture is welcome. Skipping to the middle of the album, “George Square Thatcher Death Party” is an up-tempo, bass-driven rock song with vocals cloaked by vocoder.

The rest of Hardcore is more familiar. “Death Rays” is a mid-tempo, piano-led track akin to a few songs on The Hawk Is Howling. Its buzzing riff hits a higher gear than “Daphne and the Brain,” but it occupies a similar space. “San Pedro” is a menacing, locked-in instrumental like “Glasgow Mega-Snake” or “Batcat.” With its brushed drumming and pedal steel, “Letters to the Metro” is a lilting throwback to the Come on Die Young and Mogwai EP. “How to Be a Werewolf” is filled with positive, surging melodies, like “The Sun Smells Too Loud” done right. The final two tracks, “Raging to Cheers” and “You’re Lionel Ritchie,” restructure the dynamic rockers found on Hawk by starting with head-fakes at Mogwai’s quiet reserve mode, but sure enough, each song hits its peak with a mammoth, cathartic riff.

Like every Mogwai album before it, Hardcore Will Never Die, But You Will has spent considerable time on my turntable. During that time, my initial fondness for the “new” Mogwai songs dissipated, while my appreciation for the tried-and-true Mogwai songs increased. I like the approach of “White Noise,” but it lacks the heart of their best openers. I enjoy the fuzzed-out guitar texture of “Rano Pano,” but I’m absolutely sick of its sing-song melody. “George Square Thatcher” probably rules in concert, but it lacks staying power on record. “Mexican Grand Prix” holds up the best of those, thanks in large part to Sutherland’s vocals. (Perhaps he can front that EP of Mogwai rock songs.) In contrast, “San Pedro,” “Letters to the Metro,” “How to Be a Werewolf,” and “You’re Lionel Ritchie” have emerged as highlights. They fit existing templates from Mogwai’s catalog, but damned if they don’t hit the spot. Along with "Mexican Grand Prix," those are the songs I’d like to hear on The Specialist Moves.

Hardcore Will Never Die, But You Will’s biggest risk comes on a bonus track, available on the 2CD edition and as a download with the vinyl. “Music for a Forgotten Future (The Singing Mountain)” is Mogwai’s soundtrack for an art installation, a 23-minute-long piece which forgoes percussion for most of its runtime in favor of ruminating guitar feedback, music box chimes, muted keys, and solemn violin. Brainwashed calls it the best thing Mogwai’s ever done, which is an overstatement, but I’m pleased by Mogwai’s willingness to step out of their comfort zone. The melodic and tonal shift approximately twelve minutes in and the string coda are each impressive moves, more reminiscent of Stars of the Lid than the rest of Hardcore.

It’s a shame “Music for a Forgotten Future (The Singing Mountain)” is a footnote for Hardcore Will Never Die, But You Will rather than an integral piece. There’s nothing wrong with Hardcore—it offers the same mix of styles as their last four full-lengths—but its position within Mogwai’s catalog is defined by its relation to those other titles. If you want more Mogwai, here’s more Mogwai. Guess what? The best songs are stereotypically Mogwai. But “Music for a Forgotten Future” hints at something else, a tantalizing proposition after listening to the group’s entire catalog over the past months and getting a concrete sense of Mogwai’s core identity. It’s time to take chances and expand that identity.

Home Demos – Rock Action, 2011

Highlights: “You’re Lionel Ritchie,” “How to Be a Werewolf”

Low Points: “San Pedro”

I’ve mentioned alternate takes again and again in Mogwai Discographied, preferring earlier versions of “Xmas Steps,” “Helps Both Ways,” and “My Father My King,” but none of those tracks qualify as home demos. That distinction makes this EP—an additional 12” included with the limited-edition box set for Hardcore Will Never Die, But You Will—a unique (if expensive) look into Mogwai’s creative process.

Most of Mogwai’s typical artifice is stripped away here. A drum machine fills in for Martin Bulloch. The tracks mostly lack the biting and beautiful guitar tones of Mogwai’s full-lengths. Mogwai’s thrived on craft since Come on Die Young, so hearing their music without the usual polish is disarming.

Home Demos offers early versions of five of Hardcore’s tracks. “Mexican Grand Prix” is significantly different, going exclusively electronic in its embryonic version. The album version initially sounded like a dramatic change of pace for Mogwai, a Neu! homage that twists Luke Sutherland’s breathy vocal underneath his digitized counterparts, but in comparison to this demo it sounds a thousand times more like a Mogwai Song TM. “George Square Thatcher Death Party” sounds like a demo, trading the album version’s muscular rhythms for some lo-fi drum machines. “San Pedro” follows suit, a simple drum beat plugging away as a tinny rendition of the album version’s guitars run through the same motions. “How to Be a Werewolf” benefits from more open space, its clean guitars coming much closer to Mogwai’s standard palette. It never blooms into triumphant hues, but its restraint is pleasant company. “You’re Lionel Ritchie” puts away the drum machine, letting the guitar interplay stand alone without percussion. The full crush of distortion never arrives, but the intimacy is appreciated.

Here’s the takeaway on Mogwai’s creative process from Home Demos. First, Martin Bulloch’s absence from the demo stage limits his flexibility in the finished product. He doesn’t cut loose in the Hardcore version of “San Pedro” because the song is written upon a drum machine pattern, not his playing. Second, Mogwai is capable of a purely electronic song like “Mexican Grand Prix”—and that song and “George Square Thatcher” didn’t start with clean vocals. Finally, Mogwai’s best melodies come from two or three members writing complimentary pieces in a single room, as shown on “How to Be a Werewolf” and “You’re Lionel Ritchie.” If only these mostly obvious points came a bit cheaper.

If you'd like to catch up, part one covers Ten Rapid and the 4 Satin EP, part two covers Young Team and Kicking a Dead Pig / Mogwai Fear Satan Remixes, part three covers the No Education = No Future (Fuck the Curfew) EP and Come on Die Young, part four covers the Mogwai EP and their entry in the Travels in Constants series, part five covers Rock Action and My Father My King, part six covers Happy Songs for Happy People and Government Commissions: BBC Sessions 1996-2003, and part seven covers Mr. Beast, the singles for Friend of the Night and Travel Is Dangerous, and the soundtrack for Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait. This time I tackle the pleasant surprise of 2008's The Hawk Is Howling, the Batcat EP, and their exceptional 2010 live album Special Moves

The Hawk Is Howling – Matador, 2008

Highlights: “I Love You, I’m Going to Blow Up Your School,” “Scotland’s Shame,” “The Precipice”

Low Points: “Daphne and the Brain,” “The Sun Smells Too Loud”

Overall: Like every Mogwai album since Rock Action, the response to The Hawk Is Howling was mixed. Pitchfork slammed it with a 4.5. NME doubled that score with a 9/10. Dusted calls it “subtle, but very much worth exploring,” which is an improvement from their takedown on Mr. Beast. The arm-wrestling competition between “a return to form” and “no, not more of this form” came to a standstill. There was one crucial detail to all of this waffling, however, and that was the repeated comparison to Young Team.

This comparison came easily, given the 2CD/4LP reissue of Young Team in the summer preceding the release of The Hawk Is Howling, but that wasn’t the only prompt for the comparison. Mogwai returned to Chem19 studios, last used for the No Education = No Future (Fuck the Curfew) EP and brought along Young Team co-producer Andy Miller. With ten songs stretching past 63 minutes, The Hawk Is Howling is Mogwai’s longest official LP since Come on Die Young. Finally, it’s entirely instrumental, which some critics bizarrely cited as a return to the group’s roots, even though all of their previous albums had vocals of some sort.

Young Team is my favorite Mogwai album, but I learned to ground my expectations after the Mr. Beast / Loveless fiasco. The Hawk Is Howling is more like Young Team than anything since Come on Die Young, but it’s also informed by those subsequent albums. It’s not a pure trip down memory lane, nor would I want it to be. But the approach of stretching out without getting bogged down in sprawl is welcome after three comparatively tidy LPs. I’m ready for a long Mogwai album again, even if that means sifting through some less interesting passages.

The first half of The Hawk Is Howling is a mixed bag. “I’m Jim Morrison, I’m Dead” (which prompted this amusing t-shirt) begins as typical quiet Mogwai, but builds into a dramatic peak in its second half. I could dismiss it as a recapitulation of “Sine Wave” and “Auto-Rock” with faux-strings replacing the dominant electronics of the former and the pared-down palette of the latter, but the moment when the faux-strings, frenzied guitar strumming, and piano align is undeniably effective. “Batcat” revisits the undertow riffage of Mr. Beast’s “Glasgow Mega-Snake,” capping off its final minute with a blistering assault led by Martin Bulloch’s most fearsome drumming in ages. “Daphne and the Brain,” a mid-tempo track that’s gradually taken over by IDM textures and fluttering beats, doesn’t make much of an impression. “Local Authority” thrives on open space and muted emotions, showing how a bit of the Zidane approach can go a long away. “The Sun Smells Too Loud” is atypically bright, a jaunty, melodic track that weaves an insistent guitar figure through layers of synthesizer and programming. It was released as the advanced .mp3 for Hawk, which made sense in that it’s a friendly, catchy song, but its cheerful tone sticks out on the reserved Hawk. It would have made more sense as a non-album single. The mathematically incorrect first half of Hawk concludes with “Kings Meadow,” another mellow track that forgoes percussion to give more space to its graceful arrangement of piano and guitar lines. It’s too bad they filled some of that space with intrusive electronic twinkling. That tendency for out-of-place IDM textures is my least favorite element of the album.

The Hawk Is Howling concludes with a fantastic four-song stretch. “I Love You, I’m Going to Blow Up Your School” has the best dynamic range from both production and performance standpoints since the No Education version of “Xmas Steps.” It’s not just the barely audible bass line that starts the song; it’s how the restrained calm of the first “verse” ratchets up the tension. By all means it should be louder, should pick up speed faster, but Mogwai’s committed to the plan. When the barricades finally break and the scraggly guitar lines blow up the school, it feels remarkably natural and yet still terrifying. “Scotland’s Shame” shows similar patience with its eight minutes, taking the blurred guitar and humming organs from their Zidane soundtrack and building them into a death march. The floating chimes of “Thank You Space Expert” nails Mogwai’s calm side, cresting weightlessly like the song’s title suggests. Hawk closes out with “The Precipice,” another pitch-perfect dynamic rocker like “I Love You, I’m Going to Blow Up Your School,” but with the nasty edge of “Like Herod” or Mr. Beast’s “We’re No Here.” The drop-out to just the main riff at 4:10 is particularly devastating. These four songs make up one of the best 30-minute stretches in Mogwai’s catalog.

But what about The Hawk Is Howling as a whole? Unlike Come on Die Young, which plods through its mid-album bloat, The Hawk Is Howling isn’t weighed down by the slight missteps in its middle section. Would the album be tighter and more consistent if “The Sun Smells Too Loud” and “Daphne and the Brain” became the A and B sides of a non-album single, or if one of “Local Authority” and “Kings Meadow” slipped to a b-side? Sure. But as-is, I can listen to all of The Hawk Is Howling without looking at the clock.

Batcat EP – Matador, 2008

Overall: There are three reasons to purchase the Batcat EP. First, you want very much to own a song called “Stupid Prick Gets Chased by the Police and Loses His Slut Girlfriend.” I do not blame you. It is an awesome title. You can easily overlook how its tense electronic tinkling isn't memorable enough to merit inclusion on The Hawk Is Howling. Second, you’d like to hear psych-rock pioneer Roky Erickson (of the 13th Floor Elevators) croon along with a typically melancholic Mogwai song, “Devil Rides.” Erickson’s textured, weathered voice imbues lines like “Did you miss me? I seemed so sure / The days seem longer, now you're gone” with a learned sadness. Finally, if you get the twelve-inch pressing, there’s a lovely shot of some trees at night in the inside of the sleeve.

Frankly, I wish there were more reasons to recommend it, but Mogwai’s getting stingy with the EPs lately. Batcat came out two weeks before The Hawk Is Howling. That’s not enough time to be a proper teaser. At the very least, cram it with material. “Batcat” fills an entire side of 180 gram vinyl and it’s the album version of the song. It’s not like I’m going to skip out on the album.

Special Moves – Rock Action, 2010

Highlights: “Mogwai Fear Satan,” “Glasgow Mega-snake,” “2 Rights Make 1 Wrong”

Overall: The release of Special Moves prompted Mogwai’s inclusion in Discographied, and if I valued punctuality in the slightest, it would have made a marvelous conclusion for the series. Writing about every major Mogwai release was far more tedious than I expected, but Special Moves reminds me why I’m a Mogwai fan. It’s as close to a greatest-hits compilation as you’re likely to get from the band and a vital document of their live show. It’s also a valid starting point for newcomers. The only people who won’t like this album are jerks. And I’m a jerk, so even that theory is out of the window.

Recorded during a three-night stint at The Music Hall of Williamsburg, Special Moves spans from Ten Rapid to The Hawk Is Howling. Their albums, minus Zidane, are each represented, and it’s hard to take umbrage with any of the selections. My dream set list would run four hours and include “Stanley Kubrick,” “My Father My King,” “Ex-Cowboy,” “Tracy,” “Christmas Steps,” “Small Children in the Background,” “Sine Wave,” Superheroes of BMX,” and “Travel Is Dangerous,” but I won’t admit that’s an unreasonable request for a live album. What I will admit is that the songs Mogwai chose for Special Moves are worthy of inclusion.

Opener “I’m Jim Morrison, I’m Dead” is free of the canned strings of the Hawk recording, and sounds considerable more powerful in the live setting. It leads into the elegant piano melody of Mr. Beast’s “Friend of the Night,” which flows naturally into the mid-tempo vocoder coos of Happy Songs’ “Hunted by a Freak.” It’s an excellent, if slightly restraint start, but things only get better from here.

The show-stopping moment comes in “Mogwai Fear Satan,” which shouldn’t be a surprise given the relentless praise I’ve given that song throughout this feature. After a familiar open demonstrating its brute force, glistening guitar textures, and floating melody, “Mogwai Fear Satan” lulls you to sleep for almost three minutes. It’s a simple, brutally effective trick. Shifting from near silence to raging storms, Mogwai jolt into top gear, with Martin Bulloch drumming like a man possessed. What impresses me so much about this take on “Mogwai Fear Satan” is that it shows Mogwai’s compositional flexibility in the live setting. Between trimming four minutes from the original run time, restructuring the song for maximum shock value, and adding live-wire guitar improvisations, “Mogwai Fear Satan” underscores what’s great about the original without sounding like rote rehearsal.

Things calm down with Come on Die Young’s slow-core ballad “Cody,” which looses up a bit from the austere beauty of the Government Commissions take. Rock Action’s “You Don’t Know Jesus” is a welcome inclusion, bringing some piercing feedback to the peaks of its crescendos. Happy Songs’ piano-led instrumental “I Know You Are but What Am I” is given a makeover with squelching, pitch-shifted leads, but its carefully constructed underbelly remains intact. The Hawk Is Howling highlight “I Love You, I’m Going to Blow Up Your School” hits both ends of its dynamic range on the nose, especially the introspective calm of its 90-second intro.

The home stretch of Special Moves starts with Rock Action’s centerpiece “2 Rights Make 1 Wrong.” Without studio trappings like banjo, horns, and a choral arrangement, the live take relies on aggressive drum pads, angling scythes of guitar, and Barry Burns’ digitized vocals to hit its fever pitch. Young Team’s “Like Herod” makes its mandatory appearance in any collection of Mogwai live songs, coming in at a svelte ten-and-a-half minutes. It’s not the end-all, be-all take from Government Commissions, but it fits in here nicely and doesn’t overstay its welcome. Special Moves proper concludes with a pummeling rendition of Mr. Beast’s “Glasgow Mega-Snake,” suggesting that Mogwai can, in fact, close a show without twenty minutes of distorted wreckage.

Special Moves comes with an encore of sorts: six songs included either on the fancy 3LP edition or as downloads with the standard set. Those selections—“Yes! I Am a Long Way from Home,” “Scotland’s Shame,” “New Paths to Helicon, Part 1,” “Batcat,” “Thank You Space Expert,” and “The Precipice”—lean heavily on The Hawk Is Howling, but that’s hardly a surprise given which album they were currently promoting. They certainly chose the best six songs to include from that album. Of the “encore” set, “Helicon 1” is the clear highlight, a staring-into-the-sun dose of blissful guitar noise.

Some editions of Special Moves also include a concert film from Vincent Moon and Nat Le Scouarnec called Burning. If you’re hoping for uncut takes of every song from Special Moves, Burning will be a head-scratcher. It includes parts of eight songs from Special Moves (four from the main set, four from the “encore”), so you get the woozy highlights of “Mogwai Fear Satan” and “Like Herod” stitched together without their lengthy build-ups along with a few full-length songs. ("Mogwai Fear Satan" is included in its entirety as a bonus feature.) The selling point for Burning is its black-and-white cinematography, which captures both the band and the audience with nicely framed shows loaded with shadows and intentional grain. I’ve come around on the editorial approach; I’d prefer to have 47 minutes of material filmed like this than two hours of static shots. (If you want two hours of aesthetic-free static shots, consult the DVD for Mono’s otherwise commendable Holy Ground: Live from NYC with the Wordless Music Orchestra.)

Special Moves makes me wish I’d caught Mogwai on every available tour, not just twice in Chicago in 1999 and 2001. (I also had planned concerts in Boston from 1998 and 2008 cancelled because of a flooded Middle East and Martin Bulloch’s pacemaker scare, respectively.) It has me chomping at the bit for their show here in two weeks. If my past experiences and Special Moves are any indication, they’ll play their best songs, improve the highlights from their most recent album, and leave me wondering how I could ever find so much to nitpick with Mr. Beast and Happy Songs for Happy People—provided, of course, that they only play the best two songs from each. If you have a chance to catch them, certainly do so. If not, Special Moves/Burning is an excellent substitute.

The first time I listened to Callers’ Life of Love was in the car. I cite the situation as an alibi for not immediately recognizing their mid-album cover of Wire’s “Heartbeat.” If I’d seen the track title, perhaps it would have registered immediately as their take on the quietly intense song from Chairs Missing, an album firmly stationed in my all-time top ten. Instead, I had a gradual realization starting midway through the first verse. Sara Lucas’s soulful vocals are the biggest red herring; whereas Wire vocalist Colin Newman’s hushed performance mutes every word, Lucas revels in her delivery, exploring new cadences and elongating notes. My internal debate continued until the first instance of the titular line, at which point I wondered how I ever could have doubted it. Credit Callers for completely making the song their own. Even Big Black’s 1987 version begins with Steve Albini evoking the calm blood pressure of Newman’s delivery before ramping up to industrial chants. If “Heartbeat” is Wire’s “first overt love song,” as producer/fifth Beatle Mike Thorne claimed, Callers’ take is even more overt.

Callers’ cover of “Heartbeat” is also the Rosetta stone for Life of Love: a signifier of the post-punk underpinnings percolating beneath Lucas’s chanteuse vocals. It would be easy to hear a few of the more straightforward songs—the title track, the 50s pop of “How You Hold Your Arms”—and slot Callers in the pre-punk era, somewhere between jazz night clubs and early ’70s folk. But Ryan Seaton’s guitar work keeps Life of Love unpredictable, spiking out with no wave atonality on “You Are an Arc,” making a pointillist bed of acoustic plinks on “Dressed in Blue,” and tip-toeing upwards on closer “Bloodless Ties.” These moves often put Seaton’s guitar at odds with Lucas’s expressive vocals, parrying for space and attention.

So who wins these fencing matches? Lucas, every time. It’s impossible to upstage her voice, which wobbles knees on “Roll” and demonstrates powerful range on “Young People.” She could easily be recording stacks of standards back in New Orleans, but challenging her voice with Seaton’s quick jabs is a more compelling long-term option, even if the lone cover on Life of Love demonstrates more heart (no pun intended) than any other track on the album.

Callers’ current tour with Wye Oak hits a sold-out Middle East Upstairs tonight, so if you’re fortunate enough to have tickets, you’ll get a stellar pairing of contrasting developments. Jenn Wasner’s recent emergence as a solo-shredding guitar hero didn’t happen overnight, but every Wye Oak release has been full of character and catharsis. Callers, on the other hand, have an assured aesthetic on their second album, but would benefit from opening up. Hopefully they’ll each take notes for the Wye Oak Callers Mega-Band album in 2012.

Dischord Records cult favorites Lungfish haven’t released anything since 2005’s Feral Hymns, but its members continue to channel that group’s unique energy into their recent projects. Punk rock prophet Daniel Higgs has explored distorted mouth-harp, cosmic gospel folk, and meditative chants in a string of predictably confounding solo albums. These ventures recently culminated in a welcome return to rock with The Skull Defekts’ excellent Peer Amid. Former bassist Nathan Bell, who anchored personal favorite The Unanimous Hour, occasionally echoes Lungfish’s instrumental plateaus in Human Bell. But the most elemental evocation of Lungfish’s repetitive melodies comes in guitarist Asa Osborne’s solo project Zomes, now on its second LP, Earth Grid.

There’s no getting around the surface-level simplicity of Osborne’s Zomes. Each song is a modal exploration using keyboards and tape-looped drum beats. There’s no clutter of overdubs, no latticework of intersecting melodies, no polyrhythmic swirl. Songs last as long as necessary—ranging from fifty seconds to five minutes—although a two-minute composition may feel just as long its four-minute counterpart. Recorded at home to cassette, Earth Grid’s muted lo-fi palette gives a feeling of a third-generation dub or a live performance recorded by a downstairs neighbor.

Yet much like Lungfish, the mesmerizing quality of Zomes’ meditative compositions defies their innate simplicity. The droning, lightly distorted keyboard melodies are curiously inviting, with only a brief trill at the beginning of “Step Anew” approaching abrasion. The fourteen songs fit together as one piece, yet each one offers a tonal variation. Listening to the appropriately titled lead-off track “Openings” will give you a good sense of what’s to come, but each song could be pointed out as a valid starting point.

Zomes’ Earth Grid makes the most sense when viewed as a chronological aberration in Lungfish’s evolutionary arc. Instead of being a postscript to that group’s gradual dismissal of unnecessary traits, Zomes is the primordial goo which evolved into the mighty beast. This circular development is perfectly appropriate for Lungfish, especially given the epochal “Creation Story” from Rainbows from Atoms (“As a fish realized it held a monkey inside itself / And expelled it on the beach in a larval salamander form”). The clear benefit of such prior contextual knowledge makes Earth Grid less of a starting-point recommendation for the greater world of Lungfish than The Skull Defekts’ Peer Amid, but embrace that circularity: at some point you’ll come back here and begin anew.

If you'd like to catch up, part one covers Ten Rapid and the 4 Satin EP, part two covers Young Team and Kicking a Dead Pig / Mogwai Fear Satan Remixes, part three covers the No Education = No Future (Fuck the Curfew) EP and Come on Die Young, part four covers the Mogwai EP and their entry in the Travels in Constants series, part five covers Rock Action and My Father My King, and part six covers Happy Songs for Happy People and Government Commissions: BBC Sessions 1996-2003. This time I cover the infuriating mix of overblown expectations and moderate rewards of Mr. Beast, its two fans-only singles for Friend of the Night and Travel Is Dangerous, and their soundtrack for Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait.

Mr. Beast – Matador, 2006

Highlights: “Glasgow Mega-Snake,” “Auto-Rock,” “Friend of the Night,” “Travel Is Dangerous”

Low Points: Nothing egregious, but I’ll name “Emergency Trap” and “I Chose Horses” as the weakest links

Overall: After the underwhelming Happy Songs for Happy People, my expectations for Mogwai were at an all-time low. Yet Alan McGee, founder of Creation Records, managed to perk up my ears by calling the forthcoming Mr. Beast “probably the best art rock album I've been involved with since Loveless. In fact, it's possibly better than Loveless.”

Better than Loveless, you say?

Now McGee’s both a hyperbolic fellow and Mogwai’s manager at the time, so the logical inclination is to take a statement like that with a grain of salt, but damned if it didn’t get my hopes up. Sadly, Mr. Beast is no Loveless. That point of comparison is absolutely baffling to me, since Mr. Beast is a tidy, effective condensation of what Mogwai’s done to date, not a vast leap forward. Not a genre-defining classic. Not an aesthetic touchstone for decades to follow. McGee’s claim did a massive disservice to Mogwai, since it stresses what Mr. Beast lacks and glosses over its strengths.

Mr. Beast’s strengths and weaknesses boil down to a single word: professionalism. Mogwai’s songs have never been so carefully honed, so diligently arranged. Back on Ten Rapid and Young Team, Mogwai were not nearly this meticulous. “New Paths to Helicon (Pt. 2)” is wonderfully minimal, just a few guitar lines winding together over a casual drum beat. “Tuner” is intimate and hushed. Stuart Braithwaite’s mumbled “Talked to cats for a while” is chillingly lonely. “Tracy” finds heartbreak in the spaces between the glockenspiel melody. Even their towering achievement, “Mogwai Fear Satan,” is built around three chords. These songs aren’t marvels of individual technical achievements (although Martin Bulloch slays on “Satan”), but they’re effective compositions. Yet as each album passed, those gaps were shaded in. They wrote more intricate arrangements, incorporated all five members equally, and brought in more collaborators. They became professionals.

By all means, Mogwai should be taking their craft seriously on their fifth proper LP. They should be professionals. If they’d continued to wing “Katrien” knock-offs, I wouldn’t be writing this piece. But this professionalism can be hard to love. The simple gaps and open spaces are few and far between, providing fewer jumping-off points for my imagination. Dusted Magazine’s scathing review of Mr. Beast closes with the assertion that, unlike Loveless, “there is no mystery - everything is on display.” While I don’t share Jon Dale’s spite for the material (or his considerably more esoteric taste in music), I can see his point. Post-rock, theoretically at least, requires such mystery. The usual absence of vocals/lyrics means that there’s no dominant interpretation of what the song is about. Instead, you fill in those gaps, provided that they exist. That’s the brilliance of “Mogwai Fear Satan” and the limitation of Mr. Beast.

Perhaps if Alan McGee hadn’t mentioned “art rock” or Loveless and instead claimed that Mr. Beast is Mogwai’s most rock-rock album, I would have initially viewed the record differently. There may not be a ton of mystery, but every one of these songs has something to offer and they all fit together as a solid album. Piano-driven opener “Auto Rock” is a forceful restructuring of Rock Action’s “Sine Wave,” recalculating its graphical plot into a straight diagonal between X and Y. The pounding drum beat is savagely effective. “Glasgow Mega-Snake” is a compact rocker with their meanest harmonic-laden riffs to date. “Acid Food” merges the hushed Braithwaite vocals and lap steel of “Cody” with the drum machines and gurgled electronics of Rock Action and Happy Songs for Happy People. “Travel Is Dangerous” is their most straightforward vocal indie rock song, closest to Aereogramme’s charging rockers. It’s hard to imagine Braithwaite having the confidence to pull “Travel” off on any prior Mogwai release. “Team Handed” improves those mid-tempo Come on Die Young songs with a longing melody and intrusive electronic touches. “Friend of the Night” frames one of their most polished piano melodies with blurred guitar and humming synths. The melancholy “Emergency Trap” floats by pleasantly. At 3:34, “Folk Death 95” is the tidiest condensation of Mogwai’s dynamic range here, hitting both the carefully arranged valleys and the textured guitar noise peaks. “I Chose Horses” features spoken Japanese vocals from Envy singer Tetsuya Fukagawa (who apparently traded his appearance for the right to completely rip off “Helicon One” for Envy’s “Further Ahead of Warp” from Insomniac Dose). Album closer “We’re No Here” is a bruising, six-minute evocation of the violence of “Like Herod.”

Every one of Mr. Beast’s songs is, at the very least, good. Some are excellent. There are no regular skips. No clear missteps. No padding. Mr. Beast has the best start-to-finish flow of any Mogwai album. Yet all of the prevailing critiques—it’s not a grand statement like Loveless; it lacks the open spaces of their finest works; there’s no overwhelming standout—are entirely valid. I’ve gone back and forth between these perspectives again and again during the course of writing about the album, rewriting it countless times to try to nail that internal back and forth.

It comes down to a simple realization: when I think about Mr. Beast, I like it less; when I listen to it, I like it more. That split is at the heart of criticism, the divide between higher-level thinking and gut reactions. Usually I find a healthy middle-ground, but Mr. Beast defies such finality. It’s either a disappointment in comparison to Mogwai’s finest works or a unique entry in their discography. If you can take McGee’s claims with a grain of salt and carry less baggage for Mogwai’s early work, it’s more likely to qualify for the latter status. Perhaps once I stop trying to write about the album, I’ll join you there.

Friend of the Night and Travel Is Dangerous – PIAS UK, 2006

Highlights: “Auto-Rock (Errors Remix)”

Low Points: “Like Herod (Live)” is better elsewhere

Overall: I’ve lumped together the two import-only singles from Mr. Beast, even though they have never been compiled as such. (You’ll have to wait until 2016’s deluxe edition of the album for that to happen.) Friend of the Night features two original b-sides, whereas Travel Is Dangerous offers two remixes and two live tracks. In 1997 I called these things CD5s, but apparently Travel Is Dangerous qualifies as an EP. We’ll see about that, Mogwai.

The two b-sides from Friend of the Night are perfect companion pieces for Mr. Beast, but not quite good enough to merit padding that album’s tidy runtime. “Fresh Crown” combines gentle piano, drum machine, and carefully pruned guitar feedback into a lovely package that ends all-too suddenly. “1% of Monster” pulls a familiar melodic pattern out of whirring noise and heavier drum pattern, recalling a more controlled version of “Superheroes of BMX.” Is it strange that these songs remind me most of earlier Mogwai b-sides?

On the surface, Travel Is Dangerous is considerably less essential. Two remixes and two live takes, one of which is of “Like Herod,” which you can find in excellent versions on both Government Commissions and Special Moves. Yet the Errors remix of “Auto Rock” is a personal favorite, a natural incorporation of Mogwai’s stoic piano opener into Errors’ dance-friendly electronic post-rock. Hopefully it encourages you to track down Errors’ two LPs and EP, all released on Mogwai’s Rock Action label. Acid Casuals, a side-project of Welsh rockers Super Furry Animals, provide a playful remix of “Friend of the Night” that floats by calmly. As for the live tracks, I have little need for another take of “Like Herod,” while “We’re No Here” isn’t noticeably different.

“Fresh Crown,” “1% of Monster,” and the Errors remix of “Auto Rock” are all fine, but let’s be honest: neither of these singles offers anything as revelatory as “Superheroes of BMX,” “Small Children in the Background,” or “Stanley Kubrick.” Don’t feel any rush to track them down. Waiting until 2016 might be a prudent decision. In the meantime, check out Errors.

Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait – PIAS UK, 2006

Highlights: “7:25,” “Half Time,” “Black Spider”

Low Points: “Terrific Speech,” “Time and a Half”

Overall: I’ve spent less time with Mogwai’s soundtrack for the documentary film Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait than any of their LPs. Its initial import-only release postponed my purchase of the album, only to later learn that the vinyl would never come stateside. I got a burned copy of the similarly import-only film from a friend, but my lone viewing of it didn’t floor me. Had I been a bigger fan of soccer/football at the time, perhaps it would have made more of an impression. But Mogwai’s soundtrack works best in conjunction with the film, not separated from it, so listening to it as a stand-alone album is an uphill battle.

This soundtrack’s foremost limitation is simple: it only shows the reserved, often minimal side of Mogwai. The “Rollerball,” “Burn Girl Prom Queen,” “Helps Both Ways,” “Emergency Trap,” “New Paths to Helicon (Part Two)” side. I enjoy that side of Mogwai’s music, but not exclusively. Think back to the stretch of Come on Die Young that lingers too long on mid tempos and clean guitar lines. I needed variety then, and I need it even more now. Mogwai’s Zidane soundtrack is 74 minutes long with the emphasis on long.

Repeated musical themes makes perfect sense for a film, but as an album, such repetition is tiresome. Here you have “Black Spider” and “Black Spider 2.” “Terrific Speech 2” and “Terrific Speech.” “Half Time” and “Time and a Half.” These aren’t vastly different versions. They reuse the same melodic phrasing, the same minimal arrangements. In the case of “Terrific Speech,” I was tired of its warbling organ, distant drumming, and repeated arpeggio the first time around.

Taken individually, however, many of these songs impress. “Black Spider,” originally a Rock Action outtake, recalls the quieter passages of Come on Die Young with its delicate guitar lines, but it’s the most melodically haunting piece here. The fuzz of “Wake Up and Go Berserk” envelops its acoustic guitar picking and stray piano lines, casting aside Mogwai’s usual adherence to structure. “7:25,” a Come on Die Young leftover, passes its layered guitar lines through a warm glow (and thankfully only runs 5:13). “Half Time” turns haunting guitar feedback and introspective piano into a mesmerizing semi-crescendo. “I Do Have Weapons” won’t make any hearts race, but its careful arrangement of back-masked notes, guitar arpeggios, and organs is charming. Put these five understated songs on an EP and it’s suddenly a regular spin.

The elephant in the room is the untitled hidden track that follows “Black Spider 2.” Its twenty-two minutes could be viewed as an ultra-elongated version of “It Would Have Happened Anyway,” but the formless drone has few other points of comparison in Mogwai’s catalog. A quieter version of the climax to “Stereodee,” perhaps? Eventually a pounding drum finds its way through the mist and a single organ line clears things out, but soon enough the washes of guitar noise return. This piece is more akin to Tim Hecker’s ambient noise symphonies or Sonic Youth’s SYR2 than Mogwai’s regular material. Unlike Hecker’s best work, I can’t imagine returning to this untitled track with much frequency.

The obvious advice to hear Mogwai’s music in its proper context first by seeing the documentary Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait may not have worked for me, but I still believe it’s the best course of action (especially if you’re fond of the sport). Do that, then come back to the soundtrack and pick through the debris for the winners. If you view this soundtrack as an excellent, mellow EP with some alternate takes instead of one long piece of music, you’ll be happier with the results.

Since the mighty Lungfish’s last (but hopefully not last) LP, 2005’s Feral Hymns, its punk-rock shaman/vocalist Daniel Higgs has released no fewer than seven decidedly outré solo records. (It’s hard to keep track of limited-edition, cassette-only entries.) If Lungfish’s ultra-repetitive punk-rock meditations are an acquired taste, Higgs’ ventures into distorted mouth-harp jams, cosmic/religious folk songs, and bizarre banjo instrumentals are the musical equivalent of Anthony Bourdain’s travels on No Reservations. Higgs can make those excursions palatable, but I still long for something resembling meat and potatoes. Fortunately, his newest turn as the frontman for Swedish post-punkers The Skull Defekts is an unexpectedly expected return to genuine—if twisted—rock music.

All of this build-up would be irrelevant if Higgs’ idiosyncratic vocal style failed to coalesce with The Skull Defekts’ experimental brand of post-punk. But the biggest surprise for Peer Amid is the naturalness of the pairing. You won’t mistake Peer Amid for a lost Lungfish LP, but hearing Higgs’ incantations of primitive mysticism linger over the unwavering intensity of the Skull Defekts’ locked-in rhythms, raga-informed guitar riffs, droning menace, and tribal percussion feels like a logical progression from his past work. Don’t fret if you come to Peer Amid without prior knowledge of Lungfish, Higgs, and the Skull Defekts’ considerable discographies—it’s just as valid of a starting point for newcomers.

Peer Amid covers considerable ground from the opening creaks of Higgs’ voice on the title track to the closing repose of “Hidden Hymn” (provided you’ve picked up the 2LP version with this bonus song and an alternate track order). “Peer Amid” circles mercilessly over its nine-minute runtime, lashing out with occasional venomous strikes, but the overall effect is less of a vicious assault and more of a suffocating constriction. “No More Always” is an energetic, raga boogie—a nihilistic hit single on some distant world of lizard people. The droning “Gospel of the Skull” finds Higgs ruminating on “your resonating skull sound” like no one else on earth could. The wordless chants of “The Silver River” evoke Indiana Jones peering in on the sacrificial rites of an evil cult. The eight-minute “In Majestic Drag” treats Higgs’ otherworldly cries as another element in an unnerving soup of tribal drumming, buzzing electronics, and malfunctioning guitar riffs. CD closer “Join the True” pairs Higgs’ unsettlingly calm delivery (“Join the true / Easy to do / Be as one / Who passes through”) with another hypnotic groove as you’re indoctrinated into this bizarre cult.

Time will tell if Daniel Higgs’ collaboration with The Skull Defekts is a one-off or an ongoing venture. The circular nature of these compositions—that tail-eating snake on the cover is no accident—might imply that Peer Amid is a closed loop, but I’d prefer if this collaboration continues. It won’t stop Higgs from venturing into the great beyond for inspiration, but it will provide a more accessible gateway for those interested in his cosmic sermons.

If you’re holding out hope for a Lungfish reunion, the current Skull Defekts tour offers you a tease. Lungfish guitarist Asa Osborne’s Zomes solo project opens up for the Higgs-equipped Skull Defekts. Maybe you’ll get a few quick performances from Higgs and Osborne’s The Pupils.

For an entirely instrumental ambient/noise album, there are plenty of thematic jumping-off points for Tim Hecker’s Ravedeath, 1972. First is the evocation of MIT’s piano drop tradition in the title of the opening track, the album’s cover art, and the year mentioned in the album title. That cover image—a photograph (of a photograph) of the first piano drop back in 1972 licensed from the MIT museum—is striking, a precarious tipping point of impending violence against a tangible musical object. Hecker has mentioned the increased sterility of the event, and having attended the wholly underwhelming 2008 event, I can vouch for his interpretation. Hecker has also mentioned his obsession with “digital garbage,” citing the Kazakh government’s bulldozing of millions of pirated CDs and DVDs. Finally, the base tracks for the album were recorded on a pipe organ in a Reykjavik church, then split apart by Hecker’s digital editing process, which circles back to the death of tangible music suggested by the album title.

I’ll give Hecker credit: by choosing his artwork carefully, picking evocative album and song titles, and dropping thematic discussion points in promotional materials and interviews, he’s provided templates for most reviews of Ravedeath, 1972. Here’s the thing, though: I don’t feel like these thematic touchstones are necessary to appreciate or discuss Ravedeath. (Nor do I wish to write another one of them.) Ravedeath is filled with natural discourses, which don’t mandate prerequisite reading for participation.

What strikes me the most about Hecker’s music is the constant sense of internal tension. There’s no sense of relief in the quieter, less abrasive moments of Ravedeath, 1972. They hint at the squalls of feedback which came before or which will come next. You may even be able to hear those moments off in the distance, as a threatening rumble beneath a placid calm. Similarly, even in the most abrasive, noise-driven moments of Ravedeath, there’s a melodic phrase or an emotional reserve pulsing beneath the bluster. Hecker comes close to resolving this tension a few times on Ravedeath, with the sub-aquatic drones of “No Drums,” the gentle feedback arcs of “Analog Paralysis, 1978,” and the processed piano coos of “In the Air III,” but those ghostly elements prevent a full exhale.

That tension extends to the instrumental palette. Some songs have a dominant instrument: opener “The Piano Drop” offers tremolo-filtered synthesizer; “In the Fog II” is built upon an oscillating pipe organ phrase; “Hatred of Music I” evokes the sci-fi noir of Blade Runner with its wailing, saxophone-esque synthesizer; and “In the Air I” suspends fragmented piano lines over buzzing noise. Yet most of these parts reappear in new forms, whether fractured, modulated, or buried. The three multi-song suites on the album excel at such instrumental give and take. The four songs appearing outside of those suites provide some relief from this haunting déjà vu, but still set the tone for what’s to come and provide their own set of double-takes.

None of this is wholly new for Hecker, whose body of work thrives on bridging gaps between genres, styles, and moods. His last LP, An Imaginary Country, dialed down the tension for more moments of unfettered beauty, while its predecessor, Harmony in Ultraviolet, offered greater contrast at both ends of the noise/ambient spectrum. 2004’s Mirages has discernable guitar tones, if not distinct parts. Hecker’s first two albums, Haunt Me, Haunt Me Do It Again and Radio Amor show the foundations of his sound in more explicit glitch electronic. I’ve spent time with each of these records since first hearing Ravedeath, and I’ve been impressed by how much well each album stands up on its own while still informing his subsequent works. Yet my itch is to declare Ravedeath, 1972 the most accomplished of the batch.

If Hecker’s work is all driven by various forms of tension—ambient vs. noise, electronic vs. analog, glitch vs. drone—Ravedeath, 1972 presents the best balancing act between these forces. It finds the perfect moments to tip the scales in one direction or the other, but never pushes hard enough to topple the mechanism. It’s an easy album to appreciate—especially if you go ahead and consider the thematic fodder discussed at the top—but it’s also a surprisingly easy album to enjoy. I make that differentiation often, but few albums thrive equally in both modes.

Part of the problem with my Record Collection Reconciliation posts to date is that I haven’t been upfront about the origins of these albums. 35 of the first 60 entries came from the same place and cost the same amount: $1. By my count, I own 332 total LPs from this place, all purchased for a buck, many of which are not typically found in dollar bins. I withheld this location from anyone I did not know personally for a very simple reason: competition. There was more than enough of that already.

Now that the magical well of cheap vinyl has long since dried out, I’ll reveal the secret: All of these records came from the Got Books Charity Book Warehouse in North Reading, MA, over the span of roughly two years. My first visit was in the summer of 2006, when my wife found a listing for a used book sale in the free weekly paper. I didn’t know they’d have records and the vinyl they did have on that first visit was forgettable enough not to mention. I did, however, grab a handful of interesting books, including a sixth-printing hardcover copy of Albert Camus’s The Plague with a badass embossed grim reaper on the cover. That kept me going back.

I might not have known about the sundries at stake if not for one of the warehouse’s employees, who casually informed me that you had to get there at opening Friday morning to get the fresh stock of vinyl. (Said employee later had to quit the job because of the high level of dust in the warehouse—I fortunately have shown no lasting effects.) The following week I arrived at 9am and saw a line of collectors/dealers, book and record alike. Once the door opened, they rushed to the vinyl racks in the side of the warehouse, weaving through the aisles of books. It was a swarm of balding locusts.

Let me temper your expectations, as mine were tempered again and again. All of the stock came in via donations, so the quality varied wildly based on the taste of people who’d donated, much like any Goodwill/Salvation Army/yard sale/thrift store you’ve ever visited, except on a much larger scale. Some weeks I’d find a cache of early ’70s jazz fusion, other weeks it might be Eno solo albums, but most people donated Barbara Streisand, John Denver, James Taylor, Ferrante & Teicher, and so forth. The week that truly hooked me was one of the first that I arrived early and found a pile of punk/post-punk classics: The Buzzcocks’ Singles Going Steady, Mission of Burma’s Signals Calls & Marches EP (original), the first three Gang of Four albums, Public Image Limited’s Second Edition, a few others. If not for competition from the bane of my existence (more on him shortly), I would’ve grabbed MOB’s Vs., too. It was a constant battle between hoping for specific records to show up and the reality of which ones always showed up, but trips like that one justified the commitment.

Yet I was never the only person scrounging for these records, so what I found often took second-place to what I saw other people grab.

The Competition

I love shopping for records, but I’d never thought of it as a competitive sport. If I had any hopes of grabbing the best stuff, I had to sharpen my game. I had to get to open racks first. I had to choose my first rack carefully, since it might the only one I’d have first dibs on. Unless I saw a great title at the front of a rack, I’d go for the one with the most colors on the top of the sleeves, since that indicated fewer dusty classical LPs and the potential for more recent fare. As I flipped through my rack as fast as possible, I had to keep my peripheral vision on the surrounding racks: What’s my next target? What’s the stock like today? What just got pulled? I had to memorize which racks I’d flipped through so that I got through all of the stock as quickly as possible. I learned to pull absolutely everything of interest and make the final decision at the end. There was no time to marvel at a find or linger on a potential winner. Grab everything as fast as you can.

The most important part of this game was knowing my opponents. The majority of them were local dealers, making their livelihood off their finds. By contrast, I was a graduate student trying to get a record fix on meager spending cash and build my collection. I grew to know my competitors a bit more each week, since they would talk shop waiting in line and compare finds after the fact. Here are the major players:

• The Bane: Three things gave the Bane his title. First, he was at the front of the line every week. I can only remember one week when he wasn’t there, and everyone else talked about his absence, especially his two book-dealer friends. I’d try to get there earlier than him, but it rarely worked. Second, he had some preternatural ability to find the records that most interested me and snag them first: Chavez’s Gone Glimmering, Wire’s A Bell Is a Cup…, Fugazi’s Repeater (although I found the inner sleeve, and in a decision born from vindictive angst, held onto it until he left). Third, I found his eBay store after he grabbed that copy of Mission of Burma’s Vs., and I’d check in on what he found and what it went for. This was the record-shopping equivalent of checking in on your ex-girlfriend on Facebook. Nothing good would come of it, but I’d do it anyway. Like a few of the other competitors, the Bane earned my begrudging respect and teeth-grinding hatred. He sped through the racks and only grabbed good stuff.
• The Couple: My second biggest competition was technically two people, since a young, 30-ish dealer brought his girlfriend most weeks. He was primarily interested in jazz LPs and hip-hop twelve-inches, but since he was a dealer, he’d grab anything else of interest / value. It’s likely ageist of me, but I found myself more concerned that younger dealers would recognize the merit of some late '70s or early '80s underground record than their older counterparts. The most frustrating score I witnessed was the girlfriend grabbing an original bound copy of Joy Division’s Still, thinking about it for a second, and putting it in her basket. When I ran into them selling records at the Somerville Rock 'n' Roll Yard Sale in the fall of 2008, I bought a reasonably priced copy of Eric Dolphy’s Out to Lunch, having a strong sense of his profit margin on it. He mentioned that he recognized me from somewhere, and had a laugh when I explained where.
• The Bottomless Pit: No, not Andy Cohen or Tim Midgett. This older dealer pulled absolutely everything out of the racks. If he had the slightly inkling of a record’s value or interest, it went into his heaping basket(s). You could tell if someone was new to the warehouse because they’d see a basket filled with good records, start flipping through them, and then hear the (potential) owner insist “Hello, those are mine.” He was a good spirit about it, which made sense considering his Grateful Dead obsession, but eventually he learned to put a jacket over the basket. Between his thin build, glasses, and hairstyle (balding, white hair but with a ponytail), he could have emerged from any number of local used record shops. Yet the drifter in him dominated; he’d relate stories of how many local Goodwill stores he’d hit up in the previous week. He would have been a stronger competitor if not for the toll that his genial interest had on his speed—he often stopped midway through a rack and pick up a conversation with a fellow dealer about some semi-obscure '60s rock record he just found.
• The Autograph Chaser: The other dealers were interested in records for their value as records, but the Autograph Chaser always looked a step ahead. He was mostly interested in classic rock and novelty records, since he could bring those to casino shows and book signings and presumably rake in the dough. My favorite overheard story was his absolute frustration with Stephen King, who had a reading in Harvard Square but refused to sign any books other than his newest. The Autograph Chaser waited around after the signing to follow King back to his hotel, but the inconsiderate author refused to sign any additional books. That Stephen King, what a dick!
• The Kid: He was one of the last regulars to show up during my time, a college-age kid from Lowell who loved ’70s classic rock. He was chummy with the other regulars, who were more than happy to pass along a worn Queen LP to him. He did have a streak as a dealer-in-training, relating how he bought a few hundred LPs from the backroom of a Lowell store in the hopes of flipping the valuable titles. He also had that Beatles completist streak that comes with every dealer—oh, the conversations they’d have if some remotely hard-to-find Beatles album came up.
• The Stereo Jack's guy: I didn’t recognize him at first, but soon overheard that one of the employees of Stereo Jack’s Records in Cambridge was a weekly visitor to the warehouse. It was strange knowing specifically where the records would show up, but as it turned out with the Bane and the Couple, this situation was not unique. (Sad news update: Stereo Jack’s will close in April.)

These were the most memorable people going to the warehouse every Friday, but I need to stress the gradual increase of attendees. When I started going in the mornings, I could get there at 8:50am and get a good-enough spot in line to snag an open rack. Over the course of the roughly two years I had to roll that back to 8:15am as the line grew from 15 to 50 people. Not all of them were there for the records—there were plenty of retirees stocking up on VHS tapes, book-dealers scouring the shelves for first editions, and even some people cross-checking every book with a bar-code scanner to find valuable titles for resale (I viewed this as cheating, but have since come around to the indispensable value of a smartphone while record shopping). It was like going from the minors to the pros.

The Finds

As I mentioned before, all of this would not have been worth it if not for the occasional gem. As bitterly as I look back upon my defeats, I can flip through my record collection and recall some victories. These may not be the rarest titles I found, but the stories behind them loom the largest.

• The match: I hated seeing someone else grab a wanted record, but the single most infuriating experience at the warehouse was coming across an empty sleeve. For some reason, this happened time and time again with Tom Waits albums. I’d find the sleeve for Swordfishtrombones, pick it up excitedly, and sigh at the missing weight of the vinyl (keep in mind this was before it was reissued). I’d put it in the basket on the off-chance that I’d find the vinyl in a white inner sleeve somewhere else in the racks, but that almost never happened. The exception was for The Smiths’ Strangeways Here We Come, my favorite of their full-lengths. I came across the sleeve (bearing a $4.50 price tag from Mystery Train), then frantically flipped through the racks until I stumbled upon the printed inner sleeve containing the record. I would’ve high-fived someone if I could have.
• The local cache: I’ve already mentioned how finding Mission of Burma’s Signals Calls and Marches EP was the first sign that this place was a keeper, but it wasn’t the last time I’d encounter one of Roger Miller’s projects. One week I grabbed two later Mission of Burma releases (Let There Be Burma and the self-titled EP), two No Man LPs, and a Birdsongs of the Mesozoic LP. Admittedly, most Boston-area used record stores are flooded with No Man vinyl, but at the time I felt thrilled to revisit that well.

• The seed: This entry could have been about any number of artists, since the warehouse filled in major, blinding gaps from the 50s, 60s, 70s, and 80s in my record collection. (A short list: Ornette Coleman, Herbie Hancock, The Replacements, The Rolling Stones, Minor Threat, David Bowie, Meat Puppets, Prince, XTC.) Yet one looms larger as a seed for future purchases. On a week when I found little, if anything else, nabbing the Cocteau Twins’ The Pink Opaque and Tiny Dynamite / Echoes on a Shallow Bay was a gateway drug to the group’s expansive discography. I never found another Cocteau Twins LP at the warehouse, no matter how much I’d hoped to stumble upon Heaven or Las Vegas, but it solidified my curiosity in the group after placing Treasure on my iPod Chicanery playlist.
• The snow haul: My dedication to the warehouse was always a bit stupid, but never more so than a trip up during a snowstorm. I justified it with “I’m driving against the flow of traffic” and left early to compensate, but still felt the clock rushing faster than the stop-and-go traffic. By the time I reached the warehouse, the doors had opened and the vultures had descended upon a particularly heavy load of records. I bolted to the back and sped through the vinyl as fast as I could, hitting pockets of interesting albums like four of Brian Eno’s first five solo releases and the first two Fugazi records. My final haul argued that the ends justified the means, but now I imagine what I would’ve been like if I only encountered Herb Alpert & the Tijuana Brass that day.
• The ’90s day: It took me a while to accept this fact, given my never-ending optimism that the zebra adorning Hum’s You’d Prefer an Astronaut would greet my from the middle of a rack and I’d hug the record and then chest-bump the nearby dealers, but vinyl was a niche product by 1989, let alone 1995. Cassettes and CDs had usurped the market share during the 1980s. This meant two things for post-1989 vinyl: first, there’s significantly less of it around; second, people who bought it were more likely to hold onto it. (The exception? DJs. They’d dump crates-full of black-sleeved hip-hop and dance singles once that movement had passed or their interest had waned.) Finding any rock record from the 1990s was a rarity. I only came away with one qualifying record from what I remember as ’90s day (Helium’s The Dirt of Luck, a favorite I’d owned on CD for years), since the Bane got that Chavez LP and the Couple nabbed Jon Spencer Blues Explosion’s Orange, but seeing all of those Matador titles was a tick of unfounded hope that I might encounter them again.
• The return: The feeding frenzy usually only lasted 15 minutes, by which point I’d seen all of the racks and was contemplating going through them a second time. I couldn’t narrow down my spoils (a process which seems ridiculous in hindsight—these are dollar records—but made sense at the time, since I often only had $10 in my wallet) at this point, though, since my decisions depended on seeing the results of the same process from my competitors. They rarely put anything good back, meaning that a slightly worn copy of some classic rock record might be the only addition to my pile. The exception was when someone—I want to say the Bane—put back an original copy of Dinosaur Jr.’s self-titled debut, back when they were just straight Dinosaur. I suspect that the name change might have thrown the original finder off the scent, but whatever the reason, I was thrilled it happened. (Of course, I would’ve been more ecstatic to grab a copy of You’re Living All Over Me or Bug, but I grabbed those on reissue later.)

• The rarities: I fully recognize that many of my picks are not particularly rare or valuable, but I knew immediately when I found two that were. Sometime during the spring of 2008, when the warehouse was blowing out its inventory, I found original pressings of the first two Big Star albums sitting near the front of a rack. I’ve been tempted to sell them ever since, especially after they were reissued, but I can’t bring myself to do it.

These are the exceptional stories, but most weeks it was a grind: flip through every record, find one of genuine interest and a few titles of relative interest, check out and drive home. Sometimes the records would all be leftovers and I’d come home with a few hardcover copies of Ernest Hemingway novels. Sometimes I’d convince myself to get a classic rock staple so I wouldn’t go home empty-handed. Every now and then there would be a huge week in which I’d bring home 20 records and realize that I’d eventually need to start a meme to get through all of them.

The Demise

I’ve mentioned that all of these records came from charitable donations, but what I’ve glossed over is Got Books’ business model. If you Google “Got Books,” the first auto-fill suggestion is “Got Books scam.” They’re a “for-profit professional fundraiser,” meaning that some of their proceeds go to help non-profit organizations. If you’re expecting all of the proceeds from these sales to go to charity—which you might, since Got Books’ omnipresent donation bins tout “books for charity”—you’ll be frustrated by the percentage that actually does. They do help worthy organizations, but I’ve never doubted for a second that they’re raking in money, especially when you compare what they looked like then with what they look like now.

Got Books’ inevitable expansion crippled the warehouse sale. After a few months of warnings and inventory clear-out (which I’ll close with), they moved from the North Reading location up to a larger building in Lawrence in June, 2008. The new building had a cleaner front-end—which felt like a store, not a warehouse—and more space to sort the truckloads of incoming books, videos, and records. Faced with a longer drive, increasingly spotty stock, and the advent of actual employment, I weaned myself off of my weekly visits.

Got Books also weaned themselves off of the free-for-all warehouse sales. In a series of changes reminiscent of Animal Farm, they recognized the potential for greater profit. Valuable books went up on Half.com. The warehouse store was replaced by a growing number of Used Book Superstores, in which varied (yet still cheap) pricing replaced the old dollar standard: typically $2 for a paperback, $3 for a hardcover. The records were split up between two of these locations (Salem, NH, and Danvers, MA) and given a confounding, color-coded system of pricing: something like $3 the first few days after new stock arrives, $2 the rest of that week, $1 or under after that point. This system penalizes the dealers to some extent, but if something’s actually rare, they’re still going to buy it. For me, rushing out to Danvers on a Thursday morning is neither feasible nor justifiable nowadays.

The Last Hurrah

The fall of Rome sounds like a singular event, but actually took place over hundreds of years. Similarly, although on a much smaller scale, the warehouse’s last hurrah lasted from the winter of 2007-08 into the spring. The available stock gradually increased with more racks, wall shelves, and boxes on the ground. But in some unknown, likely reformatted corner of my laptop hard drive, there’s a grainy cell phone camera picture that perfectly captures its tipping point. They’d opened up the massive curtains which separated the sale area from the sorting area, exposing enormous boxes (5’ by 5’ by 5’) of unsorted vinyl. I’d start by excavating one corner of the box, then hopped over the thick cardboard wall into the box and sorted through its contents. There wasn’t much dignity to the old method, but this arrangement felt like dumpster diving. And somewhere, there’s a photo of middle-aged dealers doing the same thing.

The problem was that the increase in volume didn’t guarantee miraculous finds, OG Big Star vinyl excluded. I remember pulling a few worthy records out of those enormous boxes—XTC’s Skylarking, Raekwon and Run-DMC twelve-inches—and otherwise being astonished by how much crap could be piled up. Prior to those trips, I’m sure I dreamed of swimming through endless dollar bins, finding exactly what I wanted, narrowly beating competitors to major scores, not seeing a single copy of James Taylor’s Flag. After them I likely had nightmares of being buried alive in tombs of Neil Diamond vinyl.

Perspective

There are other competitive forms of record shopping—the masses descending upon the record tents at the Pitchfork festival, local events like the Somerville Rock 'n' Roll Yard Sale—but nothing matches the consistent inconsistency of the Got Books Charity Warehouse. I still have a rush when I find some sought-after title at a record store, but I have to look at the price tag. I have to make a decision based upon that information. At the warehouse, if I saw Ornette Coleman’s Free Jazz, I had essentially purchased Ornette Coleman’s Free Jazz. If I found twenty great records, I could come home with twenty great records without spending $150.

I’ve reiterated again and again the amount of standard dollar-bin fare that I encountered at the warehouse to underscore the sense that this was some mystical source of exclusively awesome records. It took the issues of every record store—varying quality of stock dependent upon recent acquisitions, other shoppers, location, and rate of turnover—and exploded them. Unless you live near Amoeba in San Francisco, it’s unwise to hit any record store too often for anything other than the just-in bin. You’re going to see the same sleeves. That was the beauty of the warehouse—I could go every week, see different shitty sleeves, and maintain a realistic hope that someone who had good taste back in 1982 cleaned out their garage.

Newsflash: Tao of the Dead is …And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead’s fourth LP since their heralded 2002 LP Source Tags & Codes.This fact is surprising because I’ve treated each of their previous three LPs as a chance to properly follow up ST&C’s majestic blast of ordered chaos, making it seem like Groundhog Day, 2004. The resulting disappointment with each record is my fault as much as the band’s; at some point, I had to accept that Genesis’s The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway* is as much of an influence on them as Sonic Youth’s Daydream Nation and adjust my expectations accordingly. That point occurred with my first glimpse of the album cover for Tao of the Dead, a manga-meets-Super-Nintendo-meets-fantasy-novel design by frontman Conrad Keely. (The package also includes a graphic novel.) There’s no doubting the group’s prog-rock intentions when you wonder, “Is that Starfox on the cover?” The ST&C Trail of Dead is gone, no question about it.

This realization took much longer than it should have. Half of Trail of Dead’s ST&C line-up has since departed, with bassist Neil Busch departing for “severe health problems” in 2004 prior to the release of Worlds Apart and guitarist Kevin Allen leaving the group prior to Tao of the Dead. They went from having Keely and Jason Reece switch off drumming duties to having two drummers and a keyboard player in their six-person line-up circa So Divided to a freshly pruned four-piece for Tao. They went from smashing their equipment on stage with an independent label budget (i.e. nothing) to smashing their equipment every night on stage with Interscope’s funding (which turned their destructive tendencies into mere habit) to smashing their former major label. They went from having three songwriters trading off lead vocals (Keely, Reece, and Busch) to one dominating the albums (Keely). Their album covers have featured the history of human warfare, a Final Fantasy-esque female face, a World of Warcraft-aping airship, and an intricate pen drawing that is the end-all, be-all of high-school notebook sketches. They founded their own label, Richter Scale Records, but partnered with Universal. This history is filled with contradictions, resets, new hope, The Phantom Menace, and a towering stack of Yes albums. It would make a thoroughly entertaining episode of Pitchfork: Behind the Music.

It does not, however, provide a solid foundation for Trail of Dead’s endless ambition. Not enough has been made of Neil Busch and now Kevin Allen’s departures from the band. In addition to losing Busch’s songs (most notably Madonna’s “Mark David Chapman”), they lost the push back-and-forth between Keely, Reece, and Busch for slots on the album. They lost accountability, since I seriously doubt the group’s third substitute bassist is going to put his foot down** about the unnecessary “Pure Radio Cosplay (Reprise)” making the cut for Tao of the Dead. Most of all, they lost that sense of instrumental coherence that makes ST&C so replayable. Scott Tennent’s 33 1/3 book on Slint’s Spiderland (an excellent volume I’ll review in full one of these days) explains how the group spent an entire summer rehearsing four songs from Spiderland, five days a week, six-to-eight hours a day. I have no doubt that such laborious diligence helped perfect Slint’s material. I can’t claim to know Trail of Dead’s rehearsal schedule or writing process, but if the proof is in the pudding, the switch from natural, proven dynamics to jarring shifts that have been smoothed over with production touches might indicate less time rehearsing the songs and more time tinkering with their demos on a computer, cutting and pasting pieces together. Think of how many potentially great post-ST&C songs have been submarined by an inexplicable or unnecessary part. My two favorites, “Will You Smile Again” and “Isis Unveiled” (helped by a video edit!), each start with focus and inspiration***, but veer off course rather wildly. Pulling in prog-rock influences shouldn’t mean the absence of editiorial control, should it?

If you’re looking for cohesion—the molecules between pieces fitting properly—then Tao of the Dead is a marked improvement over So Divided and The Century of the Self. If you’re looking for coherence—those pieces making sense as a whole—good luck with this jumble of grand melodies, periodically nimble riffs, shout-along choruses, boggy, synth-laden bridges, spoken-word pretention, acoustic whimsy, and distorted bluster. The rock-opera scope of Worlds Apart and The Century of the Self remains, but the links between scenes have been lost on the cutting room floor. Tao of the Dead is an epically long 52 minutes, with the final 16 of those covered by the five-part pastiche “Strange News from Another Planet.” If you pare it down to the good ideas and sturdy songwriting, there’s a 20-minute EP waiting to be released. And I mean “released” in the “from the clutches of the evil warlock high atop Mount Doom” sense of the word.

Why bother, you ask? For the same reason I’ll watch virtually any mediocre-to-crappy action/sci-fi movie. If they pull it off, it’s surprisingly entertaining; if they don’t pull it off, it’s bound to be a spectacular failure. That’s the silver lining of unattainable ambition. I’d rather face it than middling aims meeting modest success. Maybe the next Trail of Dead album will feature both cohesion and coherence to go along with its inevitable space-opera album art. Maybe there will be a perfect film adaptation of Dune. Who knows!

* A necessary footnote: The Trail of Dead’s website has annotated lyrics for most of their albums. The annotation for Worlds Apart’s “A Classic Arts Showcase” mentions that “[t]he song riff, in 7/8 time signature, was inspired by—if not completely plagiarized from—the Genesis song ‘Dance on a Volcano.’” I saw this after coming up with my chosen prog-rock point of comparison.

** Lyric annotation footnote #2: The annotation for “Crowning of a Heart” (from The Secret of Elena’s Tomb EP) mentions, “Keely fought to have it included on the album, but by that time the band was exhausted and the idea was received with very little enthusiasm.” Willing to bet this doesn’t happen anymore.

***Lyric annotation footnote #3: The final one, I swear! I was amused to read that the opening riff of “Will You Smile Again”—one of the best things the group’s ever done—was inspired by Jesus Christ Superstar, but it makes perfect sense now.

Believe it or not, I'm deadset on finishing this Discographied run soon and moving onto my next selection. If you'd like to catch up, part one covers Ten Rapid and the 4 Satin EP, part two covers Young Team and Kicking a Dead Pig / Mogwai Fear Satan Remixes, part three covers the No Education = No Future (Fuck the Curfew) EP and Come on Die Young, part four covers the Mogwai EP and their entry in the Travels in Constants series, and part five covers Rock Action and My Father My King. This entry covers the disappointing, if not disastrous Happy Songs for Happy People and the pleasantly surprising Government Commissions: BBC Sessions 1996-2003

Happy Songs for Happy People – Matador, 2003

Highlights: “Stop Coming to My House,” “Hunted by a Freak”

Low Points: “Boring Machines Disturb Sleep”

Overall: I had a very, very brief stint writing for Stylus back in 2003, highlighted by a takedown of Liz Phair’s disastrous eponymous effort and done in by the boneheaded decision to review 57 lingering promos from the Signal Drench days (which remains one of my favorite pieces I've done). One of the few new albums I reviewed was Happy Songs for Happy People, which I gave a B-, claiming that “These Happy Songs are fine, but […] praising competence is a backhanded compliment. The highlights would be far better suited to lesser status on a great album, and turning away from the impressive vocal performances of Rock Action to fully retreat into vocoders and hushed mumbling is a step backwards.” I stand by both the grade and the sentiment (skip down four paragraphs for more detail), but there’s an interesting wrinkle. As Stylus often did, there was a second review published for the album, in which Olav Bjortomt awarded it an A. That’s not surprising—certain people claim that Happy Songs is the group’s best album—but it’s not consistent with his back-and-forth throughout the review.

Bjortomt’s review starts off with the admission that every Mogwai album, barring Ten Rapid, disappoints him. Then admits, “They're my favourite band.” After finding the flaws in Mogwai’s first three full-lengths, he comes clean: “At the time I gave the last two glowing write-ups when reviewing them. I was wrong on both counts. I had let my loyalty afflict my impartiality.” This time he vows, “I will cast a cold, unflinching eye” and proclaims, “This is set filler for the new tour.” After praising every single track, he goes broad again: “Mogwai have an album in them, capable of delighting and shocking us, of smashing our craniums in and injecting heroin in our mushed-up brains, then chucking us in a filthy ditch, left to gaze in retarded wonder at the fireworks exploding in the brooding sky.” He realizes that their eventual greatest hits compilation, which he titles “ The Greatest Fucking Record That Kicked Your Ass and Stroked Your Head Like a Puppy,” will be that album. Bjortomt concludes, “Happy Songs is a great album, but not THE great Mogwai album.”

And yet, still an A.

I’ve gone through Bjortomt’s waffling not to show him up or claim review supremacy seven years later, but to empathize with him. When reviewing your absolute favorite band, it’s nearly impossible to prevent loyalty from affecting impartiality—even when you know better. When I reviewed Shiner’s Starless for Signal Drench, I gave it the five-star treatment. With time, I recognized that Starless was a transitional album for the group. Every time I’ve written about Juno’s A Future Lived in Past Tense, which still stands as my favorite album ever, I consciously avoid mentioning how I view the atmospheric short story reading “Things Gone and Things Still Here (We’ll Need the Machine Guns by Next March)” as an optional piece of the track listing. I’m loyal to both of these bands, too loyal for immediate critical impartiality. Bjortomt’s review is a compelling document of this process. Even when he recognizes the album’s flaws, it’s still an A album. “It’s a Mogwai album,” after all.

And finally I’ll get back to that very statement. As the pull quotes from both reviews have established, Happy Songs for Happy People isn’t an album of hall-of-fame material, but it has its charms. Only two of its songs—“Hunted by a Freak” and “I Know You Are but What Am I”—made the live album Special Moves, which is the closest thing the band’s released to a greatest hits compilation, and neither is of the jaw-dropping epic variety. Breaking the album down, there’s an affecting vocoder-driven song in “Hunted,” two minimal, subtle synth-fests in “Moses I Amn’t” and “Boring Machines Disturb Sleep,” a lush mid-tempo song in “Golden Porsche,” a layered piano ballad in “I Know You Are,” one eight-minute epic in “Ratts of the Capital,” which crests admirably but never goes into Mogwai’s top gear, and three condensed takes on the Mogwai epic: “Kids Will Be Skeletons,” “Killing All the Flies,” “Stop Coming to My House.” It’s a tight 42 minute album with a few relative highs and no major missteps. To revive a confounding bit of grade hedging I learned back in graduate school, I’ll bump my previous score up to a B-/B.

Government Commissions: BBC Sessions 1996-2003 – Matador, 2005

Highlights: “Like Herod,” “Secret Pint,” “Cody,” “Stop Coming to My House”

Low Points: “Kappa,” “Hunted by a Freak”

Overall: This non-comprehensive collection of BBC sessions occupies a curious spot in Mogwai’s discography. Is it their first official live album? Not quite—many of these performances display the control of an in-studio session. Is it a collection of alternate takes? Almost—some songs certainly vary from their original versions, even improving upon them in a few instances, but others are carefully recreated. Is it a best-of sampler? Not without versions of “Mogwai Fear Satan,” “2 Rights Make 1 Wrong,” and “Stanley Kubrick.” Government Commissions is somewhere between these three points, offering newcomers a sampling of Mogwai’s work and existing fans fresh takes of songs they know.

It begins with the voice of the sadly departed John Peel ushering in “Hunted by a Freak.” It’s a fine version of one of the highlights from Happy Songs for Happy People, but along with Come on Die Young’s “Kappa,” it’s one of the least surprising (and therefore least necessary) versions here. Young Team’s “R U Still in 2 It” pulls the easy trick of removing Aidan Moffat’s vocals and going instrumental, but its drifting outro is downright lovely. Ten Rapid’s “New Paths to Helicon (Part II)” goes pro, exchanging the minimal presentation of the original version for a more elegant, piano-laden approach. After the shrugging version of “Kappa,” Mogwai keeps with Come on Die Young for a pitch-perfect take on “Cody.”

To this point, Government Commissions has been remarkably reserved, hitting only the chorus crescendo of “Hunted by a Freak,” but the live version of Young Team’s mammoth “Like Herod” takes little time to send out its hulking riffs. There’s no shortage of live versions of “Like Herod” in Mogwai’s catalog—see also the deluxe edition of Young Team, the Travel Is Dangerous EP, and the live album Special Moves—but this take is the keeper. The first time I saw Mogwai was September 10, 1999 at the Metro in Chicago and they closed with “Like Herod.” The trick wasn’t going quiet then loud, but making the loud progressively louder to the point of discomfort. By the end of the song, Stuart Braithwaite had two drum sticks and an action figure lodged in his guitar. Despite the brazen stupidity of not wearing earplugs, I loved every second of that performance, pumping my fist in the air as those wiser individuals around me covered their ears in panic. Unlike the studio version of “Like Herod,” the Government Commissions version gives you a taste of that terrifying torrent of noise. (Necessary postscript: both my ride, the esteemed Jared Dunn, and I felt downright disoriented after the show, which resulted in an disastrous journey back to Champaign. It’s a bad sign when you realize you’re in the wrong state. This anecdote has now become outdated in the age of GPS.)

It amuses me that “Secret Pint” follows such a monumental performance, much like it did on Rock Action, but here the song is up to the task. The instrumental balance is much improved, adding harmonics, downplaying the drums, turning the woozy strings into an affecting cello performance, and smoothing things over with a blissful hum reminiscent of Ten Rapid. What was one of my least favorite songs on Rock Action becomes one of my favorites here.

“Superheroes of BMX” from the 4 Satin EP makes a welcome appearance, not straying too far from the course of the original but finding new streaks of noise to run across the placid baseline. “New Paths to Helicon (Part One)” hits new heights of distorted bliss, extending the superb original take for another two minutes. And closing track “Stop Coming to My House” from Happy Songs for Happy People feels unleashed here, trading the production subtleties of the original for direct power.

The only downside to Government Commissions is the “non-comprehensive” tag I mentioned earlier. Being favorites of John Peel meant that Mogwai appeared a number of times, documented quite well on this site. It’s unfortunate that the links for that site’s unofficial Government Commissions 2 no longer work, since those excluded songs are still worth hearing. The biggest omission from the original compilation is a cover of Guns ‘n’ Roses’ “Don’t Cry” recorded for the February 17, 1998 show. Along with “Spoon Test,” which morphed into the middle section of “May Nothing but Happiness Come Through Your Door,” it’s the only song that didn’t appear elsewhere. Plus, Stuart Braithwaite’s earnest, emotional vocal and the rousing solo both stand up.

Frankly I’d forgotten how good Government Commissions is. The first half of the album and “Secret Pint” demonstrate Mogwai’s quieter side as well as any of their albums, while “Like Herod,” “Helicon (Part One),” and “Stop Coming to My House” show off the energy of their live sets. No, it’s not a proper live album, a collection of thoroughly alternate takes, or a best-of compilation, but it combines aspects of each to claim its place as a necessary piece of Mogwai’s catalog.