Pitchfork

The longest song on Mr. Beast, Mogwai's fifth studio album, runs 5:46. The entire LP clocks under 45 minutes. Ordinarily, this isn't the kind of thing you'd bother pointing out in a record review, but it bears mentioning because Mogwai are typically at their best when they let their music breathe, ebb, flow, and stretch, rather than constrict it or force it into smaller boxes. Their first and still greatest album, Young Team, showed no compunction regarding songs that extended beyond 10 minutes to make their point, and on that scale, they made the best points of their career. Last year's phenomenal BBC Sessions disc drove this home even further. Simply put, restraint does not become them.

Unfortunately, restraint is a major point of order on Mr. Beast, as it has been to varying degrees on their past few studio efforts. Though the record is at no loss for power, it mostly stores it as unrealized potential: This doesn't sound like the same Mogwai that flattens audiences and then asks if the show was loud enough. Opener "Auto Rock" begins with a quiet piano that gains intensity as other instruments join in, phaser and distorted guitar rising like dust as the volume grows. The drumbeat verges on childlike-- a simple whack on every beat and no embellishment of any kind. But after building for just over four minutes, and then coming to an unremarkable close, it fails to leave much of an impression.

The album recovers somewhat with "Glasgow Mega-Snake", which economically distills the essence of the band's crushing live show into three-and-a-half minutes of gut-punching nastiness. Its buildup pays off with a wrenching tempo shift and vicious guitar riff that leaves behind a weightless groove, proving it's possible for Mogwai to sustain their intensity in bite-size packages. Penultimate song "I Chose Horses" gets a lot of mileage out of the juxtaposition of an evenly spoken Japanese dialogue (courtesy Tetsuya Fukagawa of Japanese hardcore band Envy) against a fluctuating, mournful backdrop whose guitars are nearly indistinguishable from its synths; the primary asset of closer "We're No Here" is its sheer deafening loudness.

The other vocal tracks switch things up nicely: "Acid Food" offers one of the album's most unexpectedly beautiful moments when a pedal steel enters after the second chorus, which is sung through a vocoder. But that song's aesthetic partner, "Travel Is Dangerous", is considerably more unruly, with two-part harmonies being doused by a wall of screaming guitar in the chorus. In combination, the two songs serve to remind that post-rock can come across as more sketched than fleshed when not properly unleashed.

Mr. Beast's shortcomings lie not with what's present, but with what's missing. Mogwai are capable of tremendous beauty, poignant gloom, and ear-splitting sonic pyrotechnics, but only transcend when they combine each of these elements. Here, they rarely give themselves enough building room to conjoin these moods and styles. Resultantly, despite its peaks, the album is no match for Mogwai's best work.