Rock Action

Gone are the meandering Sonic Youth impressions, and in their place are imaginative songs that don't alienate.

A 38-minute meditation on how not to build on a hook. [Jun/Jul 2001, p.114]

Mogwai has moved past relying on Slint-like soft/loud dynamics to get attention. Now it garners attention for the detail of its songwriting, the majority of which can now be heard without turning the volume to 11, only to receive a rude awakening at the crescendo.

At just over half an hour long, 'Rock Action' is a concise and robust statement of intent. It also contains some of the most beautiful and mesmerising music you'll hear this or any other year.

A massively significant step forward.... Rock Action is so monumentally magisterial, it approaches near heretical status: the post-post-rock era's Sgt. Pet Sounds' Lonely Hearts Club Band.

If beauty and ambition be the defining values of that album title concept, they're served up here in spades.

Every note of 'Rock Action' wins every fight they've ever started, touched with an imagination and awareness of the potential of sound that puts them so far up on the moral high ground they're almost lost in the clouds.

Granted, it's not mind-blowing, and it's not nearly as masterfully executed and affecting as their earliest work. But there are only a handful of bands out there that can put out an album as well-constructed as Rock Action and still expect people to bitch and moan about it.

Restraint they were always good at, but now they're masters, and the melancholy that swelled up all over Young Team like a particularly ripe bruise is here for all the world to see in 'Rock Action''s damp eyes.

This is their most rewarding yet, built to enjoy in one 38-minute session, languid, melancholy tunes growing out of barely audible static pulses, incoherently Vocodered whispers or preposterously exciting cymbal splashes, carried on by soft pianos, vulgarity-free brass and strings into Bitch Magnet-meets-Samuel Barber electric cataclysms.

Eschewing the sprawling, double-album ethos that marked the group's early entries into indie rock, Rock Action is also more concentrated and less elliptical

An immaculate 38-minute lullaby for the not-working class, replete with tape hiss and timpani, sweetly brooding vocals, and otherworldly Hobbit-core. [5/2001, p.147]

After you've listened to Rock Action for the first time, you may be hard pressed to believe that Mogwai merely wrote these songs; you'll feel as if they created these symphonies out of thin air, pulling gorgeous sounds from within the deepest recesses of the human soul. Eventually you'll come back down to earth and realize that Rock Action is by no means divine...but it is very, very good.

Even [producer Dave] Fridmann's ever-clever studio work can't make Rock Action interesting.