MOGWAI - EVERY COUNTRY'S SUN (LIMITED COLOURED VINYL)

$62

Every Country's Sun takes two decades of Mogwai's signature, contrasting sounds – towering intensity, pastoral introspection, synth-rock minimalism, DNA-detonating volume – and distills it, beautifully, into 56 concise minutes of gracious elegance, hymnal trance-rock, and transcendental euphoria. Produced by psych-rock luminary Dave Fridmann, it's a structural soundscape built from stark foundations up; from a gentle, twinkling, synth-rock spectre to a solid, blown-out, skyward-thrusting obelisk. There's percussive, dream-state electronics ('Coolverine'), church organs as chariots of existential fire ('Brain Sweeties'), tremulous, foreboding bleeping – possibly from a dying android ('aka 47'). Their most transportive album yet, it also hosts their most fully realized art-pop sing-along of their storied history, 'Party In The Dark,' a head-spinning disco-dream double-helix echoing New Order and The Flaming Lips, featuring Braithwaite's seldom-heard melodic vocals declaring he's 'directionless and innocent, searching for another piece of mind'. This is music as a keep-out chrysalis, protective audio armor through exalting organs and portentous, dissonant guitar fuzz warping at the edges, bending the world inside-out into a reality in which you'd much rather live. The last three songs ascend into explosive exorcism, closing with the colossal 'Every Country's Sun,' its searching intensity whooshing towards infinity in a dazzling cosmic crescendo.

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