PIAS Schallplatten & CDs

Review: Scottish post-rockers Mogwai dropped their single 'My Father My King' back in October 2001 as a single. Except that it's more than just a single as it is over 20 minutes long and came as a companion to their 'Rock Action' album. It is an epic and sprawling work from the always melancholic and boundary-nudging outfit. For this year's Black Friday, it has been specially reissued for the first time since that original release on limited edition one-sided white vinyl. Just 1500 copies of this exist so do not sleep on a classic bit of Mogwai history.

Review: The sixth studio album by the Scottish post-rock band Mogwai, The Hawk Is Coming, came as yet another testament to the band's ingenious cinematic post-rock oeuvre. Ten instrumental pieces ranging from the measured and atmospheric, to the explosive and climactic, paint an implicit picture: anything could be read into this bald-eagled opus, from heartbreak over the broken promise of freedom to the ecstasy of psychic rebirth. Now for the heads, it's remastered and repressed on a limited white vinyl 2xLP.

Review: The third studio album by Scottish post-rockers Mogwai, Rock Action, was produced by Mercury Rev's Dave Fridmann, their first to incorporate synths and other more electronica-slanted textures, marking it out as a maverick LP compared to their many purely instrumental, guitar-centric slowcore projects. As ever with Mogwai, their mood of cryptic, slow-mo sublimatics remains. But there's also an early, innocent sheen on this project not heard on their later albums, be that achieved by more vocal murmurations or a feature from SFA's Gruff Rhys on 'Dial: Revenge'.

Review: One part of a large reissue bundle coming out to retrospect the work of Scottish post-rockers Mogwai, this repress and remaster of Happy Songs For Happy People serves to recall the band's early-noughties expansion outwards into using more electronic instruments and effects. Also an aesthetic curveball for Mogwai at the time - there are no vocals from Stuart Braithwaite this time, nor are progressions, famously, as generic as their then-expected "quiet-loud-louder" structure - the album was in general an experiment, atonal breakdowns and a general cacophony undercutting its no less massive and dynamic sound.

Review: Not to be confused with the YouTube publicity-stunt-fundraising star of the same name, Mr Beast is the 2006 fifth studio album by Mogwai, one hailed by fans as among their greatest and most impactful. Despite the spacious, noisy and cacophonous rock drawl characterising their sound as ever here, the album's title came after a funny story: the band's members Barry Burns and Dominic Aitchison seeing a taxi driver standing outside an airport holding a sign reading "Mr and Mrs Beast". Needless to say, the album's mood is anything but jovial but in usual Mogwai form, achieves the overwhelming and sublime more often than not.