It's a treacherous business, trying to explain Mogwai. Pretension and hyperbole lurk around every punctuation mark. Oceanic torrents of adjectives come easier than words which actually mean something. Confronted with a music that has all the emotional impact of the greatest rock, but few of its obvious signifiers, you're left struggling to make sense of the nebulous, but powerful feelings they provoke.

Either that, or you just rely on their capacity to give excellent quotes. Here's one by Stuart Braithwaite from back in 2001. "We have no relevance," he lamented, observing the way pop music is generally disseminated. "We have no relevance to that one-dimensional view of culture. That is the antithesis of us. Music as a cultural force is a way of life."

Music as a cultural force is a way of life. It's a slogan that has defined this Glasgow band for something like eight years now. In that time, they have made four albums and quite a few more singles, records which manage to combine significant might with unusual subtlety, that articulate certain profound things about the human condition - rage, euphoria, melancholy, a yearning for the transcendant, generally big stuff - with very few audible words. In that time, too, Mogwai have made an incalculable impact on the way we understand the very nature of rock, though they'd probably think such a claim would be far too crass.