Mogwai Hardcore

With tune titles like "Glasgow Mega-Snake," "Acid Food," and "I Chose Horses," it should be clear Mogwai hasn’t taken any easy, mellowing departures on Mr. Beast. Sure, the album opens with the calming guitar atmospherics of "Auto Rock," but then "Glasgow Mega-Snake" comes bounding out with a crushing jog of a beat and a trademark granite slab of guitars. The Scots also indulge incrementally more beautiful and terrifying dreamscapes, especially the down-turned piano topping that hovers above a guitar storm on "Emergency Trap" and the layers of clear-toned melody that chime over a swirl of choked, feedback-drenched power on "Folk Death 95." There has long been talk of Scottish miserablism, and this colors and grinds the idea blissfully.

Mogwai are no strangers to remix albums, having issued Kicking a Dead Pig in 1998. However, with A Wrenched Virile Lore, they offer a set of reworkings that are more cohesive than their previous collection, while still taking the songs from Hardcore Will Never Die, But You Will in notably different directions from their origins and from each other. It helps that the band enlisted a cadre of remixers that relate to different aspects of their sound and share a maverick spirit. Not many remix albums would feature a largely acoustic version of a song, but RM Hubbert's whispery reworking of one of HWNDBYW's loudest tracks, "Mexican Grand Prix," works in its own right as well as a challenge to what remixes could or should be…

This soft, melancholic, four-song EP finds the Scottish post-rockers in soundtrack mode, and it ranks among Mogwai's least fiery, least riotous recordings. Featuring material that was recorded during the "Hardcore Will Never Die" sessions but didn't make it onto the album, the EP features four songs that take the band's sound in a more subdued direction, substituting the drive of their last album with lush atmosphere.