Mogwai: "Mexican Grand Prix"

During the first round of the NHL playoffs last spring, a deafening tune launched to celebrate one of the Bruins’ goals at TD Banknorth Garden. Given the typical aggro-rock heard at such testosterone-fueled spectator sporting events, it took me a few moments listening to those relentless riffs before realizing: “holy shit, it’s Mogwai’s ‘Glasgow Mega Snake’!” Naturally, I immediately had to phone a few people who’d appreciate this occurrence; we harmonized about how bizarre this usage was.

Looking back, I wonder if we were kidding ourselves. The idea of Mogwai scoring power-play celebrations isn’t as ludicrous as it once was. To borrow a phrase from Alan McGee’s over-enthusiastic frothing for the Scottish quintet’s Mr. Beast (2006), the band’s “art-rock” has tipped onto a slippery slope, starting with “Glasgow Mega Snake” and degenerating further, with songs like “Batcat,” toward plain ol’ metal. “Mexican Grand Prix,” however, halts this tendency, instead preferring motorik-rhythms, digitized organs, and drop-in guitar-feeds. Match this sleek compositional frame with some of Mogwai’s most resourceful vocal ideas to date—a whispery intonation placates the same tempo that robotic vocal-clips attempt to agitate—and the band’s well-known, flexed-to-death muscle sounds like it is finally being finessed. With each fragmented vocal sample perfectly in place, neither the whispers nor the robot-talk amounts to much without the other; like vapours being tail-spun by their own metrical whirlwind, here the sometimes heavy-handed dynamics of post-rock are replaced with an intensity that seems to brew of its own volition. 

And the ever-looming Mogwai squall?  The guitars here never announce themselves outright; instead they are filtered and delivered as staccato cascades that supplement the rest of the arrangement’s snappiness with some lightweight dissonance. “Mexican Grand Prix,” while hardly the prettiest track on Hardcore Will Never Die, But You Will, might just be the most progressive, challenging thing the Mogwai clan could have done to reframe their typical intimidation tactics and shape something alluring—something, er, “art-rock”—out of such iconic force. I can’t find Alan McGee’s phone number but I reckon he’d agree.