Day 14: Mogwai - Rave Tapes

Artist:  Mogwai
Album:  Rave Tapes
Source:  https://soundcloud.com/rock-action-records/sets/mogwai-rave-tapes/s-Xg3A4

Pre-listening Notes:  Mogwai gets a genre tag of post-rock, which I really never got, as they are still a rock band.  They are also mostly instrumental, which is almost never my thing.  I like about two total strictly instrumental bands, Tristeza and Tortoise, but I do like some of the stuff I've heard.  A lot of people I know like this band a lot more than I do, but like I said, I do like some of it.  Let's see what they do here.

Initial Reaction:  This is starting off very much like they type of stuff that I can get into.  With instrumental stuff, I generally need the music to be calm and atmospheric, but still keep my focus enough so that I don't forget it is there.  This first song was pretty good and basically that hits it right on the head.  

Random Thoughts:    Song two starts off super synth heavy, and kept me entertained the whole way through.  Song length for me is about what I can handle of this, 10 songs in about 50 minutes.  This third song has a weird almost new wavish synth part in the middle.  And then there was voice!  Spoken word, that is.  I like this song, even with the spoken word about Led Zeppelin's Stairway to Heaven going on.  This song, Master Card, had a real cool driving guitar part throughout.  And the song Blues Hour, has vocals, not spoken word, but soft, sung vocals.  I liked that a lot!  The ending had a nice flow to it, the last two tracks sealed it as I was reading people's suggestions to the most depressing/unhappy ending to science fiction or fantasy movies.  The last song has some effects heavy vocals to it, as well.
  
Final Reaction:   Honestly, I have never had anything negative to say about Mogwai before and really I don't have anything newly positive to say either.  I like the music well enough, quite a bit actually.  I just wonder what it would sound like with vocals over it.  The thing is, the wrong vocals might actually make me like this less.  This is something I could listen to again, but it's not something I would want to put on my iPod for repeated listening.  It's awesome to have on when you want to pay attention about 60-75% of what is going on.  But, I can't even downgrade my final grade on this, because musically I really, really do like it.  This is better than I remember some of the other records being, except maybe Rock Action, and the inclusion of some sort of vocals in three of the tracks helped.

Final Grade:  7.5/10