Mogwai
Hardcore Will Never Die, But You Will

I have become a bloody snobbish jerk, lazy and a bullshitter, as well as vainly consenting to the vacuity behind dancing on architecture. Let's be clear, the urgency to obligatorily express a judgment, although knowingly useless, has been replaced by the silent cerebral pleasure of solitary listening, for which there is no need to provide an explanation. Mainly tired of the overflowing egos that some become addicted to. Musicians and dancers on architecture.

In all of this, I cannot help but feel sincere admiration for those musicians and dancers on architecture who manage to convey the sincerity of their intentions in the pure pursuit of being which, yes, might actually hide a desire to appear to be, thus returning to square one. Or maybe not.

But who gives a damn at a certain point.

What I want to say is that Mogwai, now reaching their seventh studio album after about fifteen years of a respectable career, is one of those musical entities for which I have the most heartfelt esteem and respect. What strikes me most about this group is the oozing sincerity and naturalness that hovers in each of their albums, regardless of how convincing the final product may be.

Not only that: Mogwai succeeded where an endless number of others failed, where hundreds of apparent promises slipped into the box of memories without too much noise. While remaining firmly anchored since their beginnings to a more or less unique and evident "musical philosophy" (that of the wall of sound, dynamic shifts, crescendos, and alienation - in one word, Post Rock), they have had the uncommon ability to reinvent themselves by continuously playing with expressive codes and the listener's expectations, who has now learned to predict the ending of the story but not its development. In this sense, we could call them the Feydeaus of music, eternal, masterful proponents of the same play incessantly disguised; one might ask what the true task of the artist is in general, whether to continually churn out disparate ideas in a constant attempt at renewal or to seek new developments and applications for what comes most naturally to them.

Exactly. In this album, you will find neither more nor less than what you might expect from Mogwai, but once again realized in a new form. Leaving aside the only dead moment on the album, namely "Letters To The Metro" (truly excessively self-referential), "Hardcore Will Never Die, But You Will" (by the way, fantastic title!) despite the dark and melancholic tones of the cover is an album pulled and pounded properly, where those who love Mogwai will find once again everything they could ask for from them, and perhaps something more (see the obsessive "Mexican Grand Prix", a very personal reinterpretation of electro-punk, or the majestic sound splurges of the closing "You're Lionel Richie").

Surely this album will take on a new and even better perspective live, so I strongly recommend you get off your butts and go see them at one of the upcoming Italian dates. And come and tell me how it is, because unfortunately, I'm skipping this round.

Either you love them or you hate them: the choice is yours.