Mogwai - Happy Songs for Happy People

The song titles should give away what the wryly ironic album title doesn't. Surprise!-- this is a pretty goddamned grim album. Every time I hear Mogwai, I'm struck by what a miserable portrait they paint of Scotland, full of skeletonized children, dead flies and such; as usual, Mogwai's Happy Music... evokes similar imagery. The problem is that, in spite of much of the album's comfortable ease, the quieter tone and brooding atmosphere are burdened with even less interest in taking these songs somewhere, anywhere. We're left lost, mired in Mogwai's omnipresent gloom.
Only the closing duo of "I Know You Are, But What Am I?" and "Stop Coming to My House" mercifully (and critically) avoid this. From "I Know You Are...", it's a steady progression through to the gradual dissolve of the final track's epic finish, offering closure (finally) with a sample of some very happy children (its emotional weight is adequately deflated by the carefree kids). I guess that's the joke, really: these so-called "happy people" must like uninterrupted spans of soul-crushing gloom in between rounds of concentration camp footage. Honestly, though, it's a rare, honest-to-god conclusion from these guys, and it at least punctuates the album in a clever manner if the rest of the songs don't fare as well. Mogwai still can't seem to figure out where they're going, but that problem is only extended over these tracks, as whole songs build on one another. The Stephen Kings of menacing post-rock, it seems that in absence of Young Team's glorious cacophany their tremendous build-up often comes to nothing. And it sounds as though they've come to terms with that.

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