In a Stylus piece on "R U Still in 2 It," a song from 1997's Young Team, Ian Mathers likens the beginning of the track to "a stage being set." Eric Carr predicted that 2003's Happy Songs for Happy People will be "the instrumental soundtrack to everyone’s collective thoughts" during Armageddon. WUOG, the college radio station where I work, devotes an entire two-hour block each week to post-rock, much of which reeks of Mogwai’s influence, and calls this program "Motion Picture Soundtrack." Cinema and theater have long been many listeners’ favorite trope for Mogwai’s music. By contributing to films and a Levi’s commercial, the band themselves have even validated this metaphor.

            It’s appropriate then that Mr. Beast’s first song plays like the opening sequence to the fifth film in a blockbuster series. "Auto Rock" slowly reintroduces a cast of characters we’ve come to know, love, and wrestle with in previous Mogwai recordings: misty electronics percolate, heavy fuzzed guitar provides backdrop and atmosphere, and monolithic drums storm to the top of the mix. A strident, crisp piano melody foreshadows the central role that keys will play throughout the record. And like any first scene worth its salt, "Auto Rock" teases more than it gratifies, building to a mighty stomp without offering the kind of volcanic resolution we expect from a Mogwai song.

            Along with comfort and familiarity, "Auto Rock" also instills in us a sense of fear—fear that Mr. Beast will be business as usual. Many listeners hold to the same quick and dirty view of Mogwai’s catalogue: the band peaked with their first record, has grown mellower and mellower since, and will never approximate their fierce concert performances on a compact disc. Up until now, each album has lent more credibility to this argument. Young Team was a debut like few others in the annals of rock, the kind that initiates a tectonic shift in the underground’s geometry. That album channeled the space rock innovations of groups like My Bloody Valentine and Flying Saucer Attack into Slint’s menacing, dynamic post-rock forms, but it was also a markedly accessible thoroughfare of leftfield sounds thanks to a devotion to the big riffs and bigger drama of classic rock radio stalwarts like Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath. The 90s saw many groups manipulate rock aesthetics in previously unimaginable ways, but the new terrain that Mogwai charted was perhaps the most alluring to other young bands. Their vision wasn’t as idiosyncratic as Kevin Shields’, as voraciously inter-textual as Stereolab’s, or as heady and dissonant as Gastr Del Sol’s; Young Team was the perfect fount of inspiration, completely fresh but theoretically simple to expand upon.

            "Theoretically" is the operative word here, as Mogwai’s own attempt at making a more expansive, mature follow-up LP will probably go down as their least enduring effort. The group definitely broadened their palate on Come on Die Young (1999), as multi-instrumentalist Barry Burns joined their ranks and provided the array of nuances that typically come with bigger budgets and bigger expectations. Keys, bells, and electronics began to play a bigger role, and guitar tracks multiplied. Added texture did not yield stunning results, though, as the band clung too affectionately to the soft/loud pattern they had already come so close to perfecting and devoted too much space to ambient effluvia. All Music Guide’s Stephen Thomas Erlewine issued a pronouncement that now passes for common wisdom: "[Come on Die Young] pales in comparison to [Mogwai’s] own work."

            Two years later, the group would dispense almost entirely with shambolic guitar moves and turn towards more restrained, pastoral forms. One of the most ironically titled records of all time, Rock Action capitalizes on the "increased musicality" that guitarist Stuart Braithwaite felt the band gained through Burns. As subdued a Mogwai album as there is, it’s still an exercise in immensity, substituting polish, precision, and depth of emotion for gatecrashing rockouts. Lush, poignant songwriting is more taxing than just letting it rip, though, and Rock Action lags after a while. It’s exceptional as transition albums go, but its richer sequel, Happy Songs for Happy People, demonstrated that the quieter, more reflective Mogwai was capable of much more.

            Their concerts were still pyrotechnic displays of rock prowess where even the new songs could cause a rock club’s very mortar to tremble. When I saw them in the summer of 2004, it was one of the loudest shows I had ever attended—and it was outdoors. Live Mogwai felt like a fuller band. Even with Happy Songs’ triumphs, it felt like an incomplete representation of the band’s identity, and many began to doubt whether we would receive a complex, multi-faceted recorded artifact from Mogwai ever again.

            This dissatisfaction is a symptom of a larger problem that many listeners have: an insistence on constructing an artist’s identity as a fixed, stable concept. The cult of personality teaches us to feel gypped when a band isn’t the same band on a record as they are on stage, or if their songs begin to behave differently despite bearing the same vocabulary of tones and techniques. If we think this way, texts can only change as a means of providing a picture of an evolving-but-centralized whole. Slippages, elisions, and inexplicable deviations become signs of inauthenticity and half-formed ideas. But this is an unfair schema against which to judge Mogwai when Braithwaite humbly explains that the only goal or concept that underlined Mr. Beast’s creation was "not wanting it to be bad."

            So the album is in many ways Another Post-Young Team Mogwai Record. It recalls moments from the group’s entire catalogue, but never reconciles itself with "Like Herod"s inferno. It doesn’t attempt to approximate live performances, content to exist as a closed space. We can fit it into a narrative arc if we so wish, but we’ll come away with a baffling and unhelpful picture. The only connection Braithwaite provides between Mr. Beast and his band’s other work is that it’s one "of the best ones" because "the music has a lot more to it."

            True statements, both. Never a band to reduce shimmering instrumental passages to palimpsests for solipsistic listeners, Mogwai once again tell stories with direction and clarity. More often than not, these stories render messy, complicated scenes in which depravity, desperation, and despair slip into (but never spoil) carefully framed moments of lucid beauty. Rock’s grimiest trappings ooze through the cracks in "Emergency Trap," menace and grit seeping throughthe delicate guitar chime’s pores ever so slightly. "Team Handed" plays like a classic drinking song, piano wringing out woes in a gentle stream, but subtle, disturbing gaps in the melody make it a less than desirable companion for hard times. Even "Glasgow Mega Snake," a brief roiling, metallic corker, finds its main theme subverted by darker forces. Its Iron Maiden lead and determined drum beat force the song to march onward and upward with shape and purpose, but a thick, languid layer of atmospheric guitar and synths begs the piece to abandon its journey, to rest for a while and indulge in a formless, all-consuming digital bath, like shoegazing sirens calling to a mulleted Odysseus.

            As I’ve mentioned, conceptual unity isn’t Mogwai’s aim, so it’s to be expected that a couple of songs have a completely different flavor. Album highlight "Friend of the Night" is less ambivalent about triumph and catharsis than the bulk of the album, but it sells its lack of conflict with a penetrating piano melody. The band once again looks towards heavy metal, this time translating its sonic extremism to an emotional extremism, much like Pelican did on last year’s "March to the Sea." It’s perhaps the apotheosis of the power ballad form. A less successful attempt at inducing listeners to raise their lighters and cell phones occurs in "Travel Is Dangerous," a crunching, arching rocker that doesn’t give its melody enough credit and ends up belaboring its emotional appeal through excessive fireworks and an overwrought vocal hook that brings to mind Catherine Wheel at their most contrived.

            Perhaps the greatest prejudice Mogwai’s critics have held—even greater than their demand for career narrative and solid identity—is their insistence on receiving a capital-A Album from the group, a hulking, mythic affirmation of Art and Humanity. But even Young Team feels more like a set of songs than a coherent work, and Mr. Beast continues this tradition. Odd ducks abound to the point that we can no longer brand the album with a normative style. Even when the record falters, though, it never lapses into tedium, and we haven’t been able to say that about a Mogwai record since their debut. As ground-breakers, (mostly) instrumental rockers, and cinematic stylists, Mogwai set us up to expect profundity and transcendence. When they give us music that eschews myth and narrative as readily as life itself, we fault them for it. It would be a shame to do now, because good jams are good jams, and Mr. Beast has them in spades.