Scotland's Shame

Been listening to Mogwai's latest album this afternoon. It's called The Hawk Is Howling and it's very good.

It has some great song titles as well. Like:

I'm Jim Morrison, I'm Dead

The Suns Smells Too Loud

I Love You, I'm Going To Blow You Up.

Scotland's Shame.

These are all beautiful, melodic soundscapes that showcase the band at their very peak. And the song titles are not plucked out of thin air. Each is actually about that, if you know what I mean.

The first track is really about Jim Morrison introducing himself from the grave. The sun really does smell far too loud and so on. 

Scotland's Shame is an update on the Robert Burns' poem A Parcel of Rogues:

O, would, or I had seen the day

That Treason thus could sell us,

My old grey head had lain in clay

With Bruce and loyal Wallace!

But pith and power, till my last hour

I will make this declaration :-

'We are bought and sold for English gold'-

Such a parcel of rogues in a nation!

The unionist demagoguery daily spouted by Gordon Brown and his Darling Alistair are laid to waste on this stunning instrumental track which is, to quote Pierre Hidalgo, "a polite reminder of the limitations of language".