The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Mogwai · Stuart Braithwaite, Dominic Aitchison, Martin Bulloch, John Cummings and Barry Burns · the band’s fifth studio album · ten tracks, one sequence
Mode
Instrumental rock in the post-rock manner; the crescendo compressed into song lengths, calm and force held as one material
Mythos
A beast named in the title and heard as roar, never given form; a waking and a fall laid by the sequence; a stranger’s voice near the end, unexplained
Phase
Ten tracks; a repeated piano figure under a rising band, force at once, a quiet middle, a warm melody, a spoken voice in another language, and the heaviest weight last
Presentation
Album; ten tracks, most of them without words, pieces of four and five minutes against the long pieces of the band’s earlier records
Register
Piano, guitars, keyboards and drums recorded plainly; sung voices low inside the mix on two tracks, and on one a spoken text in Japanese
Scale
One sensibility moving between calm and force; a city in two titles, danger in one, a foreign voice once
Governing Proposition
A Glasgow band that had made its name on long pieces moving from near silence to overwhelming noise cuts its crescendo to the length of a rock song and sets a piano at the front, and finds in the compression one plain finding: calm and violence are a single material, and the quiet passage is the loud one held back. The record moves between those two weathers rather than along a story, and closes on its heaviest weight.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The record begins with a piano figure, a few notes repeated and left unchanged. Under it the band gathers: guitars, keyboards and drums arriving and thickening until the piece reaches its full weight. The figure does not alter as the mass rises. Nothing new is introduced at the climax; what was there in the first bar is there in the last, only buried deeper and held up higher. In about four minutes Auto Rock states the record’s method and its finding together: the calm was carrying the storm all along, and the height is reached by accumulation, without a change of material.
Mr Beast is Mogwai’s fifth studio album, released in 2006: ten tracks, one sequence, made by Stuart Braithwaite, Dominic Aitchison, Martin Bulloch, John Cummings and Barry Burns. The band had made its name on long pieces, records on which a single track could move for many minutes from near silence to overwhelming noise. Here every piece is cut to four or five minutes. The piano comes to the front, the line between the record’s poles is drawn more sharply, and there is a little more voice, though most of the record has none.
The finding is plain and it holds. Calm and violence are one material, and the quiet passage is the loud one held back. The record states this by its form rather than by any word, and states it well: Auto Rock makes it audible, and the rest of the record returns to it from both sides. Its limit is the limit of its kind. It is a finding about a mood and a dynamic, true as a description of how this music behaves, and it names almost nothing beyond the music. The desk ranks the disclosure of a mood below the disclosure of a meaning, and this record’s disclosure is the first.
Movement II
Glasgow Mega-Snake follows at once, and the record needs it there. It is loud from its first bar, fast, distorted riffing given without preparation, and after the slow gathering of Auto Rock it shows the other pole: force as a beginning, not a reward. Placed second, it lets the record show both its weathers before it settles. Placed later, after a build, it would be one more climax; here it is a statement that force needs no build. The track reaches the dreadful kind of height, at speed, and holds it without release.
The title is the band’s habit of deflation: a comic giant snake for a city, as Folk Death 95 is a death for folk music and We’re No Here a phrase in Glasgow speech. The record’s title names a beast, and its loud tracks can be heard as the beast’s roar, but nothing in the sequence gives the beast form or passage. The titles keep myth at arm’s length as much as they summon it. What the record builds instead is a movement between poles, quiet and violent, rather than an arc: it opens on a single repeated figure, ends on its heaviest mass, and between them alternates.
The compression is the record’s turn and part of its argument. A build cut to the length of a song is shown as a unit, repeatable and finite, and the record repeats it knowingly. But the turn refines a path the band had already taken: its third and fourth albums had brought in piano, vocoder and shorter forms, and the inheritance behind them, the quiet to loud dynamic of the band’s first records and the post-rock of Slint and its successors, is kept whole. A band with an established audience made the record that audience could most readily hear. The language itself is never put at risk.
Movement III
Travel Is Dangerous opens on a sung verse, the voice low and inside the mix, and then a distorted surge overtakes it. The height is earned by the quiet that precedes it, and the voice is used as one more texture to be buried. Words are few on this record. Two tracks carry sung voices, both held down in the sound and not offered as statement; seven of the ten have no words at all. What the record knows, it knows in its dynamics, and the voice, where present, is a modest instrument placed so as to hide its limits.
Around it lies the record’s quiet middle. Acid Food is slow and quiet, with a sung voice; Team Handed is slow, piano and guitar; Emergency Trap is quiet and brief. Each is well made and each is beautiful, and none rises. They give the loud pieces rest, and some rest is required, but three pieces of one kind are more than the sequence needs, and the record would survive losing any one of them. Folk Death 95, which follows, builds at mid tempo to a loud close, the build Auto Rock and Travel Is Dangerous have already made. A third of the record is permitted rather than compelled.
The making is where the record is strongest. The distance from Emergency Trap’s quiet to the weight of the last track is held without the quiet going thin or the loud turning to mush, and at full force the guitars keep their separate lines. The playing is tight, and the drumming carries the builds without show. The palette is narrow, piano, guitars, keyboards and drums, and the build is executed several times in one way; the quiet pieces are well made rather than inventive in their making. Within those limits the craft is exact, and in the dynamic range it is load-bearing.
Movement IV
Friend of the Night is the record’s one warm melody, carried on piano over a steady beat. It is the nearest thing on the album to a pop song, and it rises by melody alone, a plain beauty given without sentiment. Its arrangement is clean and well balanced, the layering of piano, guitars and keyboards separating on return, part from part. Even here the record’s law holds: the steady repetition that carries the melody is the same law of a single state held, not developed, that governs the loudest tracks.
Near the end comes I Chose Horses: slow sound, and over it a voice speaking in Japanese, the text by Tetsuya Fukagawa of the band Envy. It is the record’s one human voice speaking and its one other person. It reaches stillness, and it places a stranger near the close like a messenger whose message is not understood. Most listeners will not follow what is said. The voice is used as timbre and as presence, and its words, whatever they are, remain closed: the record gives no means of opening them.
That is the measure of the record’s reach beyond sound. One sensibility is held, moving between calm and force. The city enters in title only. Travel and danger are named in a title. The foreign voice is present and not integrated as a subject. The family, labour, the state, history, the sacred and the natural order are absent, unless the weather of the sound is counted as nature, and it is texture rather than an order held. The archetypal frame, a waking and a fall, is atmosphere rather than construction, and because the particular is never given it cannot become archetypal.
Movement V
We’re No Here closes the record, slow and very heavy, the heaviest weight left to last. It is the sublime of mass, force without release, and it answers Auto Rock across the sequence: the record that began with one figure under a rising band ends in a weight that does not rise but presses. Set against I Chose Horses, the record’s quietest voice, it shows the reach of the record’s law. Each presents a single state without development of material, one at full force and one at rest, and both are made of the same guitars in the same room. The joins are clean, and nothing breaks the law. The range it governs is narrow, quiet to loud within one rock palette.
The record entered a crowded field. By 2006 the long crescendo was a common form in instrumental rock, in the records of Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Explosions in the Sky, Sigur Rós and the band’s own past; F♯ A♯ ∞, at 8.2, and Lift Your Skinny Fists Like Antennas to Heaven, at 8.5, are the records that set the long form this one compresses, and Ágætis byrjun stands at 7.9. Mr Beast showed that the crescendo could be cut to the length of a rock song and keep its weight, and put a piano at the centre of a heavy record. That widens the idiom without reorganising it. Auto Rock has been widely used in film and television since, a real reach, but the use of a sound already made rather than a field redirected.
Twenty years on, the recording survives whole, in print and streamed, its fabric little fixed to its year: instruments recorded plainly, no production signature of 2006, a dynamic language that has aged little. Its presence is narrower than that of the band’s first album, to which the critical return has mostly gone, and it is held as a strong record in a long catalogue more than as one heard on its own account. What it offers on the tenth hearing is close to what it offers on the first; the dynamic, once heard, is understood. It stands at 7.3, in Tier III: a well-made record of real heights and limited consequence, which compresses a known form, holds it exactly, and ends, as it means to, on its heaviest weight.
Act III · The Twelve
Ten tracks of about four to six minutes, and the frame is compelled. Auto Rock must open, a piano figure repeated until the band gathers under it, the record’s method stated in four minutes. Glasgow Mega-Snake must follow at once, the opposite pole, loud from the first bar. We’re No Here must close, the heaviest and slowest weight left to last; Friend of the Night is required as the one warm melody, I Chose Horses as the one human voice speaking. The test bites in the middle. Acid Food, Team Handed and Emergency Trap are three quiet pieces of one kind, any one of which could go with little loss, and Folk Death 95 repeats a build already made. A third of the record is permitted rather than compelled.
Score: 7.3 / 10
Disclosure through sound is credited fully, and the record has a finding: calm and violence are one material, and the quiet passage is the loud one held back. Auto Rock makes that audible, its piano figure unchanged while the mass rises under it, so that the climax is revealed as present from the start. Glasgow Mega-Snake and We’re No Here give force without release; Friend of the Night gives tenderness without sentiment. What holds the axis down is that the finding remains a mood and a dynamic more than a meaning. The record names almost nothing of the world, the sung words sit inside the mix and are not offered as statement, and the one spoken text is in a language most listeners will not follow.
Score: 7.0 / 10
Elevation is the band’s chief good, and here it comes often and in short spans. Auto Rock’s close is a real height of the grand kind, reached by accumulation without a change of material. Glasgow Mega-Snake reaches the dreadful kind at speed. Friend of the Night rises by melody, a warm and plain beauty; I Chose Horses reaches stillness; We’re No Here closes in crushing weight, the sublime of mass; Travel Is Dangerous earns its surge from its quiet verse. The record rises on five or six of ten tracks. What holds the figure is the middle, where three quiet pieces stay level, beautiful without height, and the compression of every build into four or five minutes, which limits how high a build can climb.
Score: 8.0 / 10
Myth is barely evoked and not built. The record has no figures, no story and few audible words. The title names a beast and the loud tracks are its roar, but nothing in the sequence gives the beast form or passage. The titles deflate as much as they summon: a comic giant snake for a city, a death for folk music. There is one frame, a single repeated figure at the start and the heaviest mass at the end, a waking and a fall, and I Chose Horses places a foreign voice near the close like a messenger whose message is not understood. That is atmosphere, not construction, and the particular is never given, so it cannot become archetypal. It sits below m b v, at 6.9, whose frame is at least laid by its sequence.
Score: 6.5 / 10
The inheritance is the band’s own language, the quiet to loud dynamic of its first records, and the post-rock of Slint and its successors. The turn is compression: pieces cut to four and five minutes, the piano moved to the front, a sharper division between the record’s poles, a little more voice. That is a real change of scale, but it refines a proven path, and the band had begun it on its third and fourth albums, where piano, vocoder and shorter forms already appear. The stake was small: a band with an established audience made the record that audience could most readily hear, and nothing in it risks the language itself. A wager on a proven path is not a swerve; this is a consolidation with some freshness of address.
Score: 6.8 / 10
Change the form and part of what the record knows goes. Its knowledge is in its dynamics. Auto Rock knows the climax inside the calm because the piano figure does not change while the band rises; in another arrangement it would know only that loud follows soft. Glasgow Mega-Snake knows force as a beginning rather than a reward, and that depends on its placing second. The compression argues too: the build is shown as a unit, repeatable and finite. The sequence moves between poles, quiet and violent, rather than along an arc, and closes on the heaviest weight. What holds the figure is that much of the middle could be reordered without loss, and that the quiet pieces contain a mood more than they are its instrument.
Score: 7.5 / 10
Evidence first, and twenty years supply some. The record has stayed in listeners’ return. The production repays close listening: the layering of piano, guitars and keyboards in Auto Rock and Friend of the Night separates on return, part from part. The semantic yield is thin. With few words and fewer meanings, what the record offers on the tenth hearing is close to what it offers on the first; the dynamic, once heard, is understood. No body of criticism or reworking by other artists has reopened it, and within the band’s catalogue the critical return has gone to the first album more than to this one. The well is a fine one at the level of sound, and shallow at the level of sense.
Score: 7.0 / 10
The field is instrumental rock of the 2000s, in which the long crescendo had become a common form: Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Explosions in the Sky, Sigur Rós and the band’s own earlier records. The intrinsic force is modest. The record showed that the crescendo could be compressed into the length of a rock song and keep its weight, and set a piano at the centre of a heavy record. That widens the idiom without reorganising it. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Auto Rock has been widely used in film and television, carrying the band’s crescendo into the language of screen scoring. That is a real reach, but it is the use of a sound already made, and no records or makers can be shown to have turned on this one.
Score: 6.8 / 10
Survival is weighed over twenty years, on form, then presence, then fabric. The form is whole: the recording survives as released and has remained in print and streamed. Presence is real but bounded. The record is heard and its opening track widely used, but its presence is narrower than that of the band’s first album, and it is held as a strong album in a long catalogue more than as a record heard on its own account. The fabric is light on its moment: guitars, piano, drums and keyboards recorded plainly, with no production signature fixed to 2006, and the dynamic language has aged little. The narrow presence sets the figure at the lower end of what twenty years of whole survival earn.
Score: 8.3 / 10
Command of the recorded medium is high and in places load-bearing. The dynamic range is the record’s craft: the distance from Emergency Trap’s quiet to We’re No Here’s weight is held without the quiet going thin or the loud turning to mush, and the guitars at full force keep their separate lines. Auto Rock’s build is exactly managed, the piano kept audible under the mass. Friend of the Night’s arrangement is clean and well balanced. The playing is tight, and the drumming carries the builds without show. What holds the figure is the narrow palette and the formula: the build is executed several times in one way, the quiet pieces are well made rather than inventive, and the voice is a modest instrument placed to hide its limits.
Score: 8.1 / 10
One law governs the record: sound as weather, calm and violence of one substance, held in short spans. Take the two most distant elements, Glasgow Mega-Snake, fast distortion from the first bar, and I Chose Horses, a voice speaking Japanese over slow sound. They obey the same law: each presents a single state without development of material, one at full force and one at rest, and both are made of the same guitars in the same room. Friend of the Night, the nearest thing on the record to a pop song, keeps the law in its steady repetition. The joins are clean, and nothing breaks the law. What holds the figure is range: quiet to loud within one rock palette, and narrowness is not coherence.
Score: 7.8 / 10
Judged on what the record holds. Consciousness is held, as a sensibility moving between calm and force. The city enters in title only, Glasgow as a joke giant and We’re No Here in its speech. Travel and danger are named in a title. A foreign voice enters in I Chose Horses, the record’s one other person, but what he says stays closed to most listeners and is not integrated as a subject. The family, labour, the state, history, the sacred and the natural order are absent, unless the weather of the sound is counted as nature, and it is texture rather than an order held. One sensibility holds one order fully and touches two others, and that is what holds the axis lowest of the twelve. It sits below m b v, at 6.6.
Score: 6.2 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
7.3 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier III · Major
Strongest Dimensions
The Imperishable at 8.3, then The Made at 8.1 and The Sublime at 8.0. A recording whole and in print after twenty years, its fabric of piano, guitars, keyboards and drums little fixed to 2006; a command of dynamic range that is load-bearing, the quiet never thin and the loud never mush, with Auto Rock’s build exactly managed; and height on five or six of ten tracks, from Auto Rock’s close and Glasgow Mega-Snake to Friend of the Night and the weight of We’re No Here.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 6.2: one sensibility held between calm and force, the city in two titles, danger in one and a foreign voice once, and the family, labour, the state, history, the sacred and the natural order absent. Then The Archetypal Deep at 6.5: a beast named and never given form, a waking and a fall laid as atmosphere. Then The Swerve and Pressure on Tradition at 6.8: a compression on a path the band had already taken, at small stake, widening the idiom without reorganising it.
The Necessity Cap is unmet: The Inevitable at 7.3 falls two tenths short of the threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears: The Living Form at 7.5, The Made at 8.1, The Inner Law at 7.8, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet on all five: The Imperishable at 8.3, The Unconcealment at 7.0, The Swerve at 6.8, Pressure on Tradition at 6.8 and The Archetypal Deep at 6.5 each fall short of the bar of 8.5. The Universal Minimum is unmet at The Archetypal Deep, 6.5, The Swerve, 6.8, Pressure on Tradition, 6.8, The Unconcealment, 7.0, The Bottomless Well, 7.0, and The Inevitable, 7.3, all below 7.5; The Encompassed, which it exempts, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 6.2. Two of the five summit conditions are met. The work stands where its aggregate places it: 7.3, in the band of Tier III, short of the 8.0 at which Tier IV begins and of the 9.0 that the summit requires.
Basis · the album as first released in 2006, the band’s fifth studio album, ten tracks in their original order, made by Stuart Braithwaite, Dominic Aitchison, Martin Bulloch, John Cummings and Barry Burns. Any limited edition with a film of the making, and later reissues, are context for survival, not the object. Judged from knowledge of the recording and its reception; no recording or sleeve was in hand, nothing was measured, and the record’s quieter middle is known less closely than its best-known tracks. Two tracks carry sung voices and one a spoken text in Japanese by Tetsuya Fukagawa of the band Envy, whose content could not be verified. Tracks are cited by title, and no lyric is quoted. Facts that could not be verified, among them the release dates and labels, the producer and the studio, the running time and track lengths, the issue of any single, the record’s live history and the particular films and programmes that have used its opening track, are not given.