The fifth album from Mogwai should satisfy those fans who’ve feared their heroes might be losing their sharp-taloned gremlin edge. Mr Beast, you see, is a significant jerk of the volume knob--a record that finds these Scots avant-rockers sporadically reaching again for the same skull-crushing levels of sound that lent earlier albums like 1997’s Young Team such noise-freak notoriety.

The lessons in songcraft learnt on more recent works like Happy Songs For Happy People, however, have stuck: for every dials-in-the-red rocker like "Glasgow Mega-Snake" or "We’re No Here", there’s a more sedate moment like the Barry Burns-sung "Acid Food" or piano-accompanied "Friend Of The Night" to give the album a nice peaks-and-troughs feel. There’s a special guest too, in the shape of Tetsuya Fukagawa of Japan’s Envy, a hardcore outfit with clear similarities to Mogwai’s cacophonic sturm und drang. The surprise being, however, that the track in question, "I Chose Horses" is a soft, lilting keyboard number that’s possibly this band’s plain loveliest moment to date. --Louis Pattison