As the once novel soft/loud/soft/loud recipe for instrumental post-rock threatened to become too formulaic, genre pioneers began retooling their sound mid-decade. For Glasgow’s Mogwai, this meant abandoning some of the austere, thundering compositions of yore in favor of shorter, brighter and more varied songs on 2006’s Mr. Beast and last year’s The Hawk Is Howling, a shift toward accessibility that endeared the group to new fans while predictably alienating some old ones, particularly those who lionize Mogwai’s epic, unrelenting 1997 full-length debut, Young Team.
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