It’d be daft to say that Mogwai are back, as it’s barely been a couple of months since their remix album A Wrenched Virile Law, but as far as this blogger is concerned, if there’s a new release involving Mogwai, it is right to stand up and shout about it.
As the press release has it: ‘If Mogwai’s decision to create the score to Canal+ supernatural thriller series Les Revenants (meaning ‘Ghosts’) came a little out of leftfield, then what they’ve come up with for the French television network probably wrong-footed even those that gave them the brief.
A quick background to Les Revenants: adapted from the eponymous Robin Campillo-directed 2004 film, the series unfolds in an isolated French mountain town, where the locals are troubled after children who were tragically killed in a bus crash appear to come back to life, unaware that they’d died. A wonderfully captured perennial sense of unease and limbo sustains throughout each episode, with dully lit scenes and a sparsely-set location adding to the atmosphere. “We were actually big fans of the director Fabrice Gobert’s film Simon Werner a disparu, which had a soundtrack by Sonic Youth,” comments Mogwai’s Stuart Braithwaite of their decision to take the project, “and we found the story for Les Revenants incredibly interesting.”
The band was approached on the basis of their phenomenal work for the Douglas Gordon documentary ‘Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait’. Much like on that Zidane soundtrack, the group have turned away again from their recognised path towards the fascinating new; their familiar layers on layers of textural guitar have been stripped away, allowing isolated piano and keys to wander with grip-like tension through the fourteen tracks. There’s something intangibly Mogwai here still, but it’s been refracted through a fresh prism.’
I love their Zidane soundtrack, and I also love the Sonic Youth soundtrack so am thrilled to bits about this.
What I am slightly puzzled by is the fact that it is being advertised as being out on February 25 -but you can pay for a download of it off eMusic or iTunes (remember to support your local independent record shop though, eh?) and apparently came out in December? No matter. It’s Mogwai. Go get it. Chop Chop.
Stream ‘Wizard Motor’ below: