So, it's come to this, a Mogwai live album. Usually I detest live albums, because they usually feel to me like cynical cash-ins, a way to raise a bit of extra money for the recording company without the added expense of having to actually go about recording anything. Just set up a microphone and a half-decent producer at a show, and you suddenly have a few thousand dollars worth of royalties for a couple of hours work. Luckily however, "Government Commissions" isn't one of those albums, instead being a quality work on a par with Mogwai's studio albums.

Perhaps the reason for this unusually high quality is the involvement of the late John Peel (he starts the album off with the terse announcement: "Ladies and gentlemen: Mogwai" ), and the BBC. Or perhaps the reason is that this collection of songs hasn't been pieced together from concert performances, rather everything has been recorded live in a nice quiet studio, presumably with the best equipment that money can buy. This means that there's no inane banter from the band, no idiots yelling stupid comments at the band which are picked up by the microphones, and no muffled noise from venues that are less than acoustically perfect. If it weren't for the polite applause on the first track, you might even suspect that there wasn't anybody watching the performance. There's just you and the band, and annoying distractions that get in the way of the music, which is just the way a live album should be.

The set presented here is so cohesive that it's surprising that it actually come from a number of different sources. The tracks do fade to silence at the end, so there isn't much in the way of noisy segues from one song to another, but in general, it's done so delicately that you barely even notice. The actual sound quality is impressive too; every single guitar squall and thunderous blast of noise is delivered in a glorious hi-fi quality that most bands would be happy to have on a studio album, never mind a live one.

As for the actual songs themselves, they're delivered impressively too. Hunted By A Freak kicks things off, the eerie distorted quasi-vocal line sounding practically identical to the album, but still sounding like a damn good opener. It's followed up to R U Still In 2 It, a song which I could never really sink my teeth into, but which is still delivered in a professional enough way. As the disc winds on though, they move into some of their lesser-known tracks, like Cody, which comes complete with its brooding, low-mixed vocals - a treat from a band that is primarily noted for being instrumental. No Mogwai collection would be comprehensive without the thunderous Like Herod, which is reproduced here in a full eighteen-minute freakout, with "that moment" even more startling and jarring than it is on the album. New Paths To Helicon (Part 1), a personal favourite of mine, is also featured here, with its crescendo sounding as triumphant and glorious as ever.

It's impossible to say that this is a definitive collection of Mogwai's best work, given that neither the brutal My Father, My King, nor the epic Mogwai Fear Satan are present. Still, given the difficulty of fitting those two tracks onto a single eighty-minute disc along with the rest of this music, they can be forgiven. If you're into Mogwai's music, than you need this album. If the bug hasn't bitten you yet though, the wide selection of music from their albums, and the uninterrupted nature of the music, makes this a fine introductory album as well.