I feel like curating the Mogwai best-of must have been one of the easiest tasks whoever did it did that week; if you put their back-catalogue on shuffle and took the first three hours of songs that came up, you'd have a collection that was both a) uniquely Mogwai and b) full of bangers. It goes without saying that the actually-curated best-of is an amazing listen and a brilliant use of 12 sides of vinyl and well over three hours of your time.
My Mogwai collection still has some glaring holes, but I've been enjoying gradually working on it – one large hole is their debut album Mogwai Young Team, one of the first albums of theirs I heard (which I bought on cd in Spillers a week after buying The Hawk is Howling). Whilst under-represented here (on paper at least - do we count the original version of Summer separately? Does it's 16-minute runtime balance out the multiple shorter songs from other albums?), it is great to finally have Mogwai Fear Satan on vinyl. There's still something really pleasing about seeing one song take up a whole side of vinyl and Mogwai Fear Satan does that perfectly. It's then quite surprising that the other song that takes up a whole side of vinyl never made it onto an album, despite being a live favourite and ridiculously huge song – it takes a lot of sides of vinyl to get to My Father My King but it is absolutely worth it every time. I suspect at some point after getting most of the LPs on vinyl I'd have got round to seeking out the single, but I'm glad I've been listening to this for the last six years, rather than waiting for the point in my life when I got round to seeking it out. I love that you can see the quiet part in the grooves of the vinyl.
Mogwai have been around long enough to have a number of different eras, and I think I'm firmly a circa-2010 era guy. It might help that The Hawk is Howling was the first album of theirs I heard, but I also love Hardcore Will Never Die and I think Les Revenants is the greatest soundtrack they've done by a good distance – it’s a contender for the "best soundtrack that actually works even better as an album", running against The Fountain, which they were also involved with, although I'm never very sure how much was Clint Mansell and how much was Mogwai. Anyway, as a result I think the selections from those albums are great. The songs from Mr Beast also sound amazing, more-so than I remember them sounding on the actual LP. We're No Here sounds particularly great. The early era has some highs and some lows for me – Summer is a huge way to start (I love the way it races ahead of the xylophone) and Christmas Steps is the highlight of Come On Die Young. I've never really loved that album as much as everyone else seems to, and Cody feels like a bit of a downer here. Similarly, Stanley Kubrick from EP (or EP+6, as I know the release) is a bit nothingy.
The odds and ends that make up the final two discs are interesting - Hugh Dallas is always good (classic slow build) and Devil Rides with it's vocals from prolific musician Roky Erickson is unexpected and a bit bizarre, but great to hear. Strangely, we get one song from Les Revenants in the usual chronological section as well as one in this section - not sure why. Personally, Hungry Face is the one I associate more with the show, but Wizard Motor is probably the better song in the usual sense. Earth Division is another nice one I wouldn't have heard. I didn't realise until just now that the song itself isn't on the Earth Division EP (which I regret not buying when I saw it in Banquet around the time it came out - I can't remember why I didn't buy it).
It'd be wrong to not dwell on just what a nice package this boxset is too. Each record has one letter from the word "Mogwai" on the cover and a selection of incredibly brightly coloured sleeves, contrasting the grey, fabric-lined outer box. The booklet is brilliantly detailed and a good read - the concert tickets and set-lists from over the years are particularly nice. All this for just under £50 is a ridiculous bargain - they could have charged twice as much and I'd still have bought it and still have been raving about how great it was.
Format: 6x 12", boxset, booklet
Tracks: 34
Cost: £49 new
Bought: Norman Records website
When: 23/10/15
Colour: Black
Etching: None
mp3s: Download code
