Last year’s Hardcore Will Never Die But You Will marked a renewed confidence and critical resurgence for Scotland’s most lauded experimental rock band. It fulfilled the promise of vibrant electronica made on 2001’s Rock Action and 2003’s Happy Songs For Happy People while simultaneously bringing back the old post rock fans by birthing a couple of beautiful quiet/loud guitar monsters. In many ways it’s the ideal Mogwai gateway album – tunes, style and slamming walls of noise. So obviously in their dark humoured wisdom they’ve decided to hand these songs over to be gutted, mauled and remodelled as they did with their landmark album Young Team on 1998’s luminous Kicking A Dead Pig.

While things are scaled down in terms of name talent on this anagrammatically titled offering (…Pig boasted reinterpretations from Arab Strap and Alec Empire while the accompanying disc even held a My Bloody Valentine remodel) it’s nonetheless a challenging and deeply atmospheric listen, allowing fans of the album on which it’s based to pull a variety of pleased, surprised and angry faces as they realise what’s become of their most beloved track.

Beak> man Matt Loveridge will raise nods of approval and a little twitchy nervousness as he takes the moniker Klad Hest for his version of the mighty ‘Rano Pano’ and turns the bruising anthem into a jittery, glitched-out fast-forward spacewalk that suddenly lurches into more head-frying territory with speaker-bouncing drum samples that build to create an all-embracing if overtly aggressive wall of song.

More unusual but equally superb is the rebuilt ‘Mexican Grand Prix’ constructed by fellow Chemikal Undergrounder and widely regarded acoustic guitar player to the Gods, RM Hubbert, who lets out an intricately woven whisper of a cover version that actually provides a rare opportunity to concentrate on voice and melody in a Mogwai song. It’s a real deviation from the standard remit of the remix and all the more satisfying for it.

Drawing frowns will be San Franciscan synth-punkers The Soft Moon and their vision of ‘San Pedro’. This is trad territory indeed, your standard throw-a-few-beats-in redux with a splash o’ high end static and a little brutalism thrown in for bad measure. Unfriendly and unlikeable it is – but also perfectly brief. Similarly banal is ‘Too Raging To Cheers’ which has been remodelled by Umberto – it’s a meditative drag that lacks the spark of the original and offers nothing in its place.

More pleasing are the surprise of Godflesh’s Justin K Broadrick’s tender, shoegazing take on ‘George Square Thatcher Death Party’ which takes the seashore shine of the original’s guitar lines and pushes them to the front of the mix to oceanic effect.

Ultimately though, these tracks and their companions will fade into relative insignificance when compared to Robert Hampson’s near 14 minute take on both ‘White Noise’ and ‘George Square…’ (one by one and at the same time no less), retitled ‘La Mort Blanche’. Ex-Loop leader Hampson has created the most intricate and instinctive track here as he massages each of their most memorable moments into a languorous dream. The cumulative effect is overwhelming. While the central motif of ‘White Noise’ is lavished with all sorts of implausibly gorgeous ambient attention it is when the main focus of attention is switched to ‘George Square’ that things really take off. When the bass rolls in at about 9.05 the listener is dropped into an alternate universe of valium bliss. The whole tear-pricking experience is, one would imagine, similar to listening to a pair of your favourite songs simultaneously through a car stereo while floating in the farthest reaches of outer space (how the car got there we don’t know). It’s a quarter of an hour of smart, spiritual, elegiac joy that listeners will return to again and again and is without question the crowning achievement of the record.

So is there a point in chucking your precious tunes through the mangler? Well none of these fit the old-school remit of turning indie rock into floor fillers (thankfully) but at least half the running time here points at the positive and in Hampson’s closer they’ve found something like the “ultimate” Mogwai remix. It’s well worth making an investment in a band that continues to stride forward and treat their own career with a sense of freedom and abandon that is increasingly rare around these parts.

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