Mogwai – Rock Action

Description

Rock Action, the third full-length album from Mogwai, is a sort of compromise; it’s out with harsh walls of feedback and allusions to Glaswegian gang warfare, and in with banjos, trombones, electronics, and–for the first significant time on a Mogwai release proper–vocals, from the band’s Stuart Braithwaite. At thirty-eight minutes, Rock Action is surprisingly brief–it boasts a mere eight songs, two of which are pretty perfunctory bursts of noise: the Kid 606-style electronic distortion of “Sine Wave” and the molten industrial racket of “Robot Chant”. But what’s here is likeable; “. While Mogwai’s razor edge is sorely missed, Rock Action is a compromise only to the inevitable effects of musical evolution. They haven’t lost a thing.