Let's Get You Started with... Modest Mouse

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I apologize for the lack of a subscriber-only post this week. Next week will be all subscriber-only.

It might perhaps seem odd to write a post introducing one of indie rock’s most successful and critically-endorsed acts. But Modest Mouse has always stayed an arm’s length away from total approachability, retaining a certain sourness to their sound and an inscrutability to their lyrics, which have helped them remain distinct in a sea of indie bands and made them beloved of many introspective, lonely people like me. They crafted a time-honored classic with their second album, graduated to a major label deal without losing much of their outsider cred, and even survived being a one-hit wonder. Leader and lyricist Isaac Brock, the only consistent member of the band, has a well-deserved reputation as an arch ironist and playful thinker, the ultimate outsider who looks at the world from a distance, slightly askance, while admitting his own tangled and imperfect place in it. “If God gives life, he’s an Indian giver,” he once sang, and he’s not wrong. The band’s discography is both voluminous and uneven, filled with treasure and with some filler, and so I’m going to make some recommendations for you all today.

The Beloved Classic: The Lonesome Crowded West

Easily one of the most beloved indie records of all time, The Lonesome Crowded West is a touchstone for many. My brother gave me this CD for Christmas when I was perhaps 17, and it was genuinely life-changing for me, if you can forgive me for falling into indie cliche. Here were the same basic strong structures and instruments that could be found on my beloved Beatles and Nirvana records, but stretched in just the right places, to the point that the whole thing felt slightly askew. There’s always just enough dissonance in Modest Mouse’s sound, which (I will grudgingly admit) was ably described in Pitchfork as rangy and volatile. That dissonant element never left their music, and did not always work to their advantage - their later album Good News for People Who Love Bad News sometimes uses the sourness expertly and sometimes clumsily, to pick an obvious example. But on The Lonesome Crowded West the strangeness mostly comes from some odd tempos and from Brock’s weighty but unserious, plaintive but irony-laced vocals. Whatever the special sauce, the album is one of the great road trip records ever made, one that somehow captures the spacious American landscapes of its title.

The album reaches fullest flower on “Trailer Trash,” one of my all-time favorite songs. An homage to Brock’s time living in a trailer park as a child, the song retains a remarkable universality, and for me as an adolescent brilliantly encapsulated the feeling of being a teenager, the weight of expectations and the bittersweet rhythms of life. “Short in love with a long divorce,” Brock quietly intones; the song is remarkable for the restraint in its vocal performance, somehow managing to be both meek and reserved and to simultaneously express longing, boredom, and wry unhappiness. It’s a beauty.

Other standout tracks include “Jesus Christ was an Only Child,” “Styrofoam
Boots,” and my pick for neglected gem in Modest Mouse’s canon, “Polar Opposites,” a jaunty, smirking ode to getting by with pluck and alcohol. But honestly, it’s all killer here, their best album and one that deserves its reputation.

The Mainstream Masterpiece: The Moon and Antarctica

Almost nobody, these days, still complains about musicians selling out, except perhaps for me. (It’s complicated.) But even I know that there’s nothing inherently illegitimate about signing with a major label, with apologies to Steve Albini. There was, or so it seems from my research, a little backlash to the band signing with Epic, and the album clearly evolved the band’s sound in the way people fear from major-label turns, which is to say prettier, poppier, and more extravagantly produced. The result, though, is not a sugary mess but a beautiful, intricate, and shimmering exploration of very different sonic spaces. The album’s best-loved track, “Gravity Rides Everything,” is just lovely, a bouncing, almost ethereal tune that showcases how the band’s sonic palate had grown from the more conventional altrock sounds of their first two albums. “Lives” is a strange song that features lyrics that are quintessentially Modest Mouse and which changes unexpectedly from a dour acoustic number to an up-tempo wail of mysticism and exhortation, buttressed by a sorrowful cello.

my
mom’s
God is a woman
and my mom she is a witch

It’s “3rd Planet” that contains perhaps my favorite-ever Modest Mouse lyrics, which is really saying something. A twisty, looping song that makes me think of having a picnic with someone you love, perhaps on a day that’s just a little too chilly for that purpose. It’s a perfect encapsulation of Modest Mouse’s tendency to veer between the grandly philosophical and the intimate, half a navel-gazing consideration of the cosmos and half a lovely little miniature of the joy of other people’s bodies.

your heart
felt good
it was drippin’ pitch and made of wood
and your hands
and knees
felt cold and wet on the grass to me

But it’s “Wild Pack of Family Dogs,” a bizarre and beautiful daydream of a song that pushes past lyrical absurdism into gorgeous surrealist imagery, that rivals “Trailer Trash” as my favorite of the band’s entire oeuvre. Its jangly, nursery-rhyme instrumentals achieve the perfect balance with Brock’s strange little story. I just adore it.

The Moon and Antarctica is not an album to be missed.

The Fan-Favorite Original: This is a Long Drive for Someone with Nothing to Think About

As is so often the case with first albums, many Modest Mouse fans love this album the best, though I am not one of them. Certainly “Dramamine,” many people’s all-time number one tune of theirs, is a marvel, an extended metaphor of a relationship as a road trip, and a bumpy one. It’s just a lovely, lovely tune, one the band could only have written when they were young, and its plaintive wailing expresses stabs of raw emotion that bring perfect contrast with the looping and interlocking instrumentals, which approach math-rock territory. (American Football owes a great deal to this record, I suspect.)

There are other gems, such as “Custom Concern,” a depressed, moody number with a little cowboy twang and some great vocals.

this’ll never end, this’ll never end, this’ll never
stop

…
gotta go to work, gotta go to work, gotta have a job!

I also quite like the album-closing “Space Travel is Boring.” That said, a lot of this album is a little samey-sounding, and they didn’t have as full of a palate as they would grow to utilize over time. I enjoy all of it, and it’s (naturally) excellent music for a long road trip, but I’m not listening to the deeper cuts here the way I am with the preceding two records. The songwriting is as tight as it gets here, but they’re a band that benefitted dramatically from expanding what they were doing instrumentally and melodically.

The Weirdest One-Hit Wonder: Good News for People Who Love Bad News

GNFPWLBN is both Modest Mouse’s most obvious commercial success and also, for many, where they started to slip. I actually like it better than some, and it has grown on me over the years; I never thought it was a bad album, but over time I’ve come to find more to admire in its many weird nooks and crannies. I half-wonder if maybe the previous record’s success pushed the band to get a little more dissonant; certainly the brassy horns that punctuate the record are an immediate sonic turnoff. If so, it’s a great irony, then, that the album produced a certified hit, “Float On.”

I’ve heard tale that the song is “ironic” and thus that all the people who sang along to it on Top 40 radio were somehow dupes, but this is snob cope - Brock himself said that he just wanted to write something more positive in light of the repetitive darkness of the Iraq war era. And it’s a really fun tune, filled with Brock’s usual wry observations and a driving bassline that helps keep the jittery guitars from going fully awry. I’m also not too cynical to appreciate the message, which is one of resilience and keeping a certain detached humor about you when everything goes wrong. No wonder it went to number one on the charts, truly rarefied air for an indie band.

For me, the standout track is “The Ocean Breathes Salty,” a cheeky number that showcases both Brock’s usual defiance (“I’ll tell you what you get, you get away from me,”) and his playful consideration of life, the universe, and everything. It’s the best example of the album’s near-dissonance and circus sounds.

Well that is that and this is this
Well you tell me what you saw and I'll tell you what you missed,
when the ocean met the sky
You missed when time and life shook hands and said goodbye
When the earth folded in on itself
And said "Good luck, for your sake I hope heaven and hell
are really there,” but I wouldn't hold my breath

Another top-tier track is “The View,” which shows Brock at his most pensive and expansive, and includes one of my favorite lyrics of all time.

if life’s not beautiful without the pain, well I would just rather never ever even see beauty again

That’s a sentiment I’ve shared many times in my life. At other times the sourness does exceed the cleverness, for me, such as with “Bukowski,” a tune that’s as dyspeptic as its namesake and which offers very little to me, personally. Otherwise I appreciate half of this record simply for stretching the sonic territory typical of indie rock. I’m not sure if there’s literally a calliope on the album but there are some real waves to carnival music either way, and while I can’t say I love it I admire the ballsiness of it all.

The Ones You Can Probably Skip: We Were Dead Before the Ship Even Sank and Strangers to Ourselves

Both of these records have their defenders, particularly WWDBTSES. I can see value in that record. The above track, “Spitting Venom,” is Modest Mouse at their hardest rocking, a song that expertly builds tension with the plodding first minute and a half and then releases it with snarling guitars and vocals. I also enjoy “Little Motel,” an unusually tender and sincere tune for Brock that also showcases how much the band’s sound expanded over time.

We trade tit for tat like that for this
And don't think that that was an insult, it wasn’t
I can see it in your eyes like I taste your lips and
I'm very sorry

'Cause that's what I'm waiting for
That's what I'm waiting for
That's what I'm waiting for, aren't I?

All in all, though, to me there’s more filler than killer to We Were Dead, and the follow-up was even less inspiring. Strangers to Ourselves I just don’t get anything out of, try as I have. I owe it another listen, but certainly it will remain at the bottom of my personal rankings. For diehards only, in my opinion.

The One I Haven’t Listened to Yet: The Golden Casket

I will, eventually, but with the disappointment of Strangers to Ourselves, I haven’t quite had it in me yet to listen to this album, which was released last year. You know how it is; it’s tough to watch a beloved band age out of their prime, especially if you fell in love with them when you were young. It’s no insult if their good work is behind them - they’ve been putting albums out for almost thirty years, after all. If it turns out to be a return to form, it’ll feel like a bonus.

One Dope Cover: EMA, “Trailer Trash”

Modest Mouse is such a remarkably distinctive band, and Brock’s nasally tones are so central to their character, that I don’t think many acts could cover them effectively. But I love this one.

If you listen to this music a bunch and you like it, support the band financially!