Mogwai - Black Spider/Half Time

This 10" features two tracks of new material by those carefree Glaswegian post-rockers, plucked from their soundtrack for Douglas Gordon's new film, 'Zidane...'. And it sounds, inevitably, like film music. Black Spider is a pretty web of guitars and glimmering keys, a motif stretched out beyond the point of memorability. Half Time is much more compelling, a slow build not to noisiness but just to density: like compressed feelings finally loosed, steamy puffs of air. These guitars and piano make a music that does feel genuinely post-rock, as if part of a long collapse. Or of a game that will inevitably, win or lose, come to an end. [Sean Michaels]