Over the previous 30 years, Mogwai have gifted us among the biggest music titles within the historical past of music-naming rights. The place their post-rock friends lean towards earnest sentiment or alarmist messaging, Mogwai deal with their tracklists like bathroom-stall graffiti. Whether or not it’s “I’m Jim Morrison, I’m Lifeless,” “Don’t Consider the Fife,” of “Silly Prick Will get Chased by the Police and Loses His Slut Girlfriend,” their titles are much less about speaking the particular temper or implicit intent of a music than offering an outlet for absurdist inside jokes. However on their eleventh album, Mogwai give you a music title that’s so on-brand, they need to put it on bumper stickers and ball caps.
Showing two tracks into The Unhealthy Hearth, “Hello Chaos” reads like Mogwai’s model of “whats up Newman”: a routine greeting to an outdated adversary encountered time and time once more. However because the music demonstrates, the earth-quaking eruptions that beforehand outlined the band have change into much less an endgame than a routine passing phenomenon. In lieu of the creeping build-ups and climactic crescendos of previous Mogwai set items, “Hello Chaos” ambles about as if on a leisurely Sunday-afternoon stroll, and as soon as the music’s bluesy chorus provides approach to a needling downpour of guitar noise, Mogwai successfully pop open an umbrella, making certain secure passage by the storm. Whereas it might lack the ingredient of shock that powered their most totemic works, “Hello Chaos” is emblematic of Mogwai’s m.o. right this moment: The place they as soon as reveled in disrupting ominous quietude with explosive outbursts, today, they’d slightly redirect tense power into uplifting expression. As such, a band that when provided apocalyptic mayhem has change into a supply of comforting consistency as the actual world turns evermore turbulent.
For the previous decade or so, Mogwai have been having fun with a brand new lease on life just like the ’80s reinventions of prog-rock figureheads like Rush, Sure, and Genesis: Synths have change into as integral to their sound as guitars; the songs not stretch previous the 15-minute mark; and the band’s exploratory sensibilities are counterbalanced by a melodic finesse. Within the course of, Mogwai have additionally managed to achieve new followers with out alienating too many aged ones: With 2021’s Because the Love Continues, they turned the uncommon veteran indie-rock band to attain a U.Ok. No. 1 album a quarter-century into their existence.
However the band’s present cruising altitude has not been with out shocks of turbulence. Whereas The Unhealthy Hearth’s title would possibly really feel significantly related proper now, it really derives from an outdated Scottish slang time period for “hell.” And that’s an apt description of multi-instrumentalist Barry Burns’ expertise as recording commenced: His younger daughter had simply obtained a bone marrow transplant and chemo therapy, and her prospects of survival have been unsure. Fortunately, she pulled by, and whereas the album’s opening observe, “God Will get You Again,” just isn’t explicitly about that ordeal, it nonetheless stands as a testomony to her perseverance. Following a tense two-minute opening flurry of arpeggiated synths, the music achieves liftoff because of Martin Bulloch’s driving drum sample and Burns’ washed-out vocals, which remodel an enigmatic but evocative nine-word lyric written by Burns’ daughter (“rely the roads/ Dallas eyes/ don’t breathe air”) into a private mantra that reifies their father-daughter bond.
