Mogwai: Happy Songs For Happy People : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

Glasgow's Mogwai, like Low, their nearest discernible psychic cousins, perpetually mine one beautifully bummed-out vein and dig deeper into it with each album. They have a sense of humor, but you'd only know it from the song titles (e.g., "Kids Will Be Skeletons" and "Hunted by a Freak"); they fill the sarcastically named Happy Songs, with lovely wintry keyboard washes, guitars that slowly wax into rage, and an ambience of thick-blooded despair. "Ratts of the Capital" is the model: It begins with wiry strumming and a bass line so atmospheric that, like the sheets of synth, it hardly seems human, before the tune swells into a crescendo of tyrannosaur riffing. The music by bands on this kind of eternal blissful bummer trip walks a fine line between bewitching and dire; in the case of Mogwai, it's usually the former.

PAT BLASHILL
(RS 927, July 24, 2003)