Mogwai

Mogwai

Happy Songs for Happy People (Matador) The greatest thing about the new Mogwai record? It illustrates just how good the last one was. Happy Songs for Happy People offers many of the thrills of Rock Action, but without the diversity and succinctness that made that album shine. Happy Songs picks up where Rock Action left off, with the disjointed cymbal splashes and vocoder approximations of "Hunted by a Freak" mirroring that record's "Sine Wave" and "Take Me Somewhere Nice." Happy Songs finds Mogwai stepping up the orchestral arrangements without falling back on the devastating noise bursts of their early material. The transitions are seamless and the flow is unrelenting, yet the end result rings hollow, even compared to the similarly ambivalent Come on Die Young. Centerpiece "Ratts of the Capital" is the exception. It captures all the patient intensity -- and volume -- that makes Mogwai a legendary live band. Behind a typically repetitive line, the layers of time and space are peeled back methodically and scientifically. At the core is a dirty doom-metal fuzz storm equal parts Tony Iommi and Bardo Pond. The album's final tracks offer seeds of progress. "I Know You Are but What Am I?" delivers a new paradigm, with Barry Burns' piano weaving a repetitive metronome usually reserved for the guitars. Closer "Stop Coming to My House" hits the mark, as subtle layers of cacophony gradually overtake a sublime, free-floating ambience. Most of Happy Songs, though, feels sort of "almost there." Which is closer to the mark than Radiohead's Hail to the Thief, but still short of the Scots' high standards.