Mogwai operate in a small space, where change decelerates into their music in lightly perceptible ways. Rave Tapes, the band's eighth album outside of their soundtrack and remix work, has been built up for its increased use of electronics, with a debt partially owed to the vintage synth scores that have held a sustained (and seemingly ever-increasing) influence over a huge swathe of underground artists. The first song to be released from the album, "Remurdered", certainly hinted that analog sounds would form a more rigorous backbone to their music than before, although they've been dabbling in this area since Rock Action in 2001. In truth, "Remurdered" is something of a red herring. If that song feels like a fuller manifestation of ideas that have taken over a decade for Mogwai to reach, Rave Tapes mostly tells a different story—one that digs harder into a place they've consistently circled back to throughout their career.
This is the second Mogwai album in less than a year, following their creepy 2013 soundtrack to the French TV show Les Revenants. That album is among the most introspective work they've ever recorded—no mean feat for a band so inward facing—and it's a tone they've only modestly advanced on for Rave Tapes. It's not hard to pull all the elements together and theorize at how they arrived at the humorous title for the record, which reads as a direct inverse to the morose worldview of the album and a poke at anyone thinking they’ve "gone electronic." Still, that's hard to square with a track like "Master Card", where the circular guitar motions they so often make remain front and center, and the analog sounds skirting across the surface only serve to keep familiar dynamics intact. The past hangs heavy on the shoulders of these guys, seemingly always keeping them in check even when you think they've reached a point of separation with it.
It's been 17 years since Mogwai’s debut, Young Team. That album emerged with stories of the band members taking on assumed identities and shaving their heads before entering the studio—a totemic representation of their full-blooded commitment to the cause, analogous to going into battle. It isn't hard to figure out who the major influences were on the band back then, but Mogwai had a combative feel that many of their peers shied away from. They had the air of a band that you committed to, that you argued over. There's been a natural fade away from that youthful starting point, as well there should be—it's not really befitting for a group of dads in their late 30s to enter a recording studio like they’re going to bootcamp. But still, there are elements left behind that could benefit from being intact on Rave Tapes, such as the astonishing ebb and flow of "Mogwai Fear Satan", or even odd impulses like getting Roky Erickson to guest on a track. Instead, it's hard to see what this offers that we don't already have.
Rave Tapes is the work of an oddly conservative band, turning away from the openness they once embraced. At some point Mogwai got less interested in testing the boundaries of their music, instead settling for being comfortable working within them. The bass-y keyboard grind that emerges at times is a new appendage, but the material it's dressed up in strains under the weight of familiarity, ultimately resembling an exercise in Mogwai box-ticking. So here comes the Codeine-lite vocal piece ("Blues Hour"), here comes the one with the vocoder ("The Lord is Out of Control"), here comes the one with the funny title ("Simon Ferocious"), here comes the one with the sampled spoken word dialogue ("Repelish"). It's hard to shake the feeling that this is a band trapped in their own creation, occasionally looking for somewhere else to go but unable or unwilling to fully get there.
Most groups don't leave behind the core signifiers that bring them attention in the first place, so Mogwai are far from an isolated case when it comes to looping back on themselves. In many ways they're victims of their earlier snottiness and ambition. The screaming guitars of "Like Herod", the sheer beauty of "Helicon 2", the bratty spat with Blur, the punk nihilism of calling an album Come On Die Young—they don't need to return to such things, but it does make the level of complacency they're operating at now such a baffling and frustrating end game to it all. At this point it feels like there isn't anywhere else they can go with this music, so infinitesimally small are the strides taken toward a better place. Mogwai have worked heavily in the visual realm in the last year, on Les Revenants and a live performance of their Zidane soundtrack. Maybe the cliché about instrumental bands creating "soundtracks for films that don't exist" has a grain of truth for them after all. Here, Mogwai’s cautionary approach all but drowns out the faint echoes of the once brave band struggling to get out from within.
