Mogwai - Every Country's Sun

Vinyl LP pressing. Every Country's Sun takes two decades of Mogwai's signature, contrasting sounds - towering intensity, pastoral introspection, synth-rock minimalism, DNA-detonating volume - and distills it, beautifully, into 56 concise minutes of gracious elegance, hymnal trance-rock, and transcendental euphoria. Produced by psych-rock luminary Dave Fridmann, it's a structural soundscape built from stark foundations up; from a gentle, twinkling, synth-rock spectre to a solid, blown-out, skyward-thrusting obelisk. There's percussive, dream-state electronics (""Coolverine""), church organs as chariots of existential fire (""Brain Sweeties""), tremulous, foreboding bleeping - possibly from a dying android (""aka 47""). Their most transportive album yet, it also hosts their most fully realized art-pop sing-along of their storied history, ""Party In The Dark,"" a head-spinning disco-dream double-helix echoing New Order and The Flaming Lips, featuring Braithwaite's seldom-heard melodic vocals declaring he's ""directionless and innocent, searching for another piece of mind"". This is music as a keep-out chrysalis, protective audio armor through exalting organs and portentous, dissonant guitar fuzz warping at the edges, bending the world inside-out into a reality in which you'd much rather live. The last three songs ascend into explosive exorcism, closing with the colossal ""Every Country's Sun,"" it's searching intensity whooshing towards infinity in a dazzling cosmic crescendo.