Modest Mouse

Go to the grocery store, buy some new friends

(from “Teeth Like God’s Shoeshine”)

When Modest Mouse appeared in “The Family Ties”, the seventh episode of the second season of “The O.C.”, it was 2004, and the gang of former losers led by Isaac Brock had already turned into a bunch of superstars. For indie rock, that period was a kind of golden age: bands like Modest Mouse on one side of the ocean and Franz Ferdinand on the other (stylistic differences aside) topped the charts with the sound of sharp, brazen riffs, so it wasn't exactly a mismatch or a stretch to associate names and sounds like these with a globally successful teen drama series like “The O.C.”, whose lead character (the sweet, self-deprecating, iconic Seth Cohen, played by Adam Brody) has as his favorite band Death Cab For Cutie. There is, however, a huge difference between Modest Mouse or Death Cab For Cutie and all the other bands who performed at the Bait Shop – the venue frequented by the show's characters – like the Killers, the Walkmen or the Thrills.

The two Washington State bands were indeed going through a moment of great fame, riding this huge indie wave respectively with “Good News For People Who Loves Bad News” (Epic, 2004) and “Transatlanticism” (Barsuk, 2003), but unlike every other band around at the time, they had already been active for about a decade and had helped build that very aesthetic themselves, with guitars as much as with checkered button-down shirts. By that point, Modest Mouse (and DCFC with them) were simply reaping the fruits of seeds they'd sown unwittingly. Success had arrived without betraying their roots, and in truth without even chasing it all that hard. Proof of this lies in every Modest Mouse album that followed, never too eager to pander to the milder tastes of their vast new following.

“Good News For People Who Love Bad News” has warmer, less skeletal sounds and is, on the whole, less bad-tempered than what Modest Mouse had produced before, but just like the albums that would follow it, it marks a variation on the band's guitar rock theme rather than a revolution aimed at chasing a bigger following and bigger paychecks.

The roughness and bite of Modest Mouse's sound, especially their guitars, comes less from the post-grunge Seattle of the mid-90s than from the Olympia (Washington) scene and the bands that revolved around it, such as Lync, Unwound, Built To Spill and Heavens To Betsy. It's also the work of the album's producer, who had also handled some of the trio's earlier productions, Calvin Johnson (Beat Happening/Dub Narcotic System/Halo Benders), the deus ex machina of the Olympia indie scene and the architect of the lo-fi indie sound of many Pacific Northwest bands, all of them produced through his label K Records (to name just a few, besides Johnson's own bands: Built to Spill, Microphones, Girl Trouble and Some Velvet Sidewalk).

The two crucial albums, the necessary roots for the evolution of the band's career, and thus of the American indie scene of the 2000s, of which Modest Mouse were a guiding star, are “The Lonesome Crowded West” (Up, 1997) and “The Moon & Antarctica” (Epic, 2000), with the latter marking their debut on a major label and an expansion of the band's sonic possibilities, thanks to more varied arrangements and orchestral flourishes.

So it's “The Lonesome Crowded West”, the band's second effort (or third, if you count “Sad Sappy Sucker”, released in 2001 but actually recorded before “This Is A Long Drive For Someone With Nothing To Think About”), that stands as the perfect album to approach Modest Mouse's sound in its purest form, preserving the best fruits of that version of the band, given how overly raw some moments of its predecessor are. Produced by Johnson, Brock and Scott Swayze, mainly at Moon Studio in Olympia, with a stop at Avast Studios in Seattle, the album is made up of fifteen tracks.

Arriving on record store shelves on November 18, 1997, a year in which the music press's attention was pointed squarely elsewhere ("OK Computer" and everything that came with it, just to give you a clear frame of reference), "The Lonesome Crowded West" displays on its cover the twin towers of the Westin Seattle, piercing a hazy sky readying itself for evening, and together with the album's title, it primes the listener for what's inside. Tons of loneliness, the kind felt at the center of a crowd, whether it's a mass shuffling apathetically along a subway station's escalators or the one contained within a Seattle hotel. Five hundred, a thousand souls in the same box, yet unable to communicate, surgically separated as if by thin drywall partitions. A loneliness that Isaac Brock, Jeremiah Green and Eric Judy react to erratically, in fits and starts, translated musically into jolts, convulsions, explosions through the dynamic built between the three musicians and between the various sections that make up each song. The guitars on "The Lonesome Crowded West" are raw nerves exposed, tuned so taut they seem on the verge of snapping, yet they're also damn elastic, pliable and springy, capable of shifting from the hushed melody of a cascading arpeggio ("Out Of Gas") to the ironic post-punk spirit that de-eroticizes rock and funk clichés ("Lounge, Closing Time"), to the most nervous and furious of riffs (try keeping up with what happens across the five minutes of "Trailer Trash", for instance, or the systemic collapse of "Shit Luck").

The influence of Pavement and Pixies comes through loud and clear in the acidic, agitated riffs, as does that of other indie bands like Meat Puppets ("Jesus Christ Was A Only Child") and even their contemporaries Sleater-Kinney ("Convenient Parking"), while certain more placid, subdued arpeggios seem shaped by the midwest-emo of the time. Despite these echoes, the resulting songs are so distinctive that Modest Mouse can be recognized after three notes in a row. The clearest manifesto of this sound and songwriting style is precisely the album's opening track, "Teeth Like God's Shoeshine", an absolute masterpiece of American indie rock and a statement of aesthetic intent: crooked riffs, blurted-out verses, neurotic pauses, ragged bends, tempo changes and whispers, screams and accelerations, empty spaces and dense clusters, and one of the finest closing passages in the history of indie:

Take ‘em all for the long ride

And you’ll go around town no one wants to be uptight anymore

You could be ashamed or be so proud of what you’ve done

But not no one, not now, not ever or anyone

Despite such a visceral, emotional approach to music, the rhythm section and guitars remain remarkably precise (on "Truckers Atlas" the drums are a lethal groove machine), at times even sketching out geometric shapes and sharp angles, as if trying to contain, to channel all that inner instability. Millimeter-perfect structures and interlocking parts, sudden shifts in rhythm and meter, abrupt mood reversals (another discography Modest Mouse must have devoured is that of Talking Heads): an organized, whirling chaos, made possible by the immense talent of the three musicians, barely in their twenties at the time, and by the chemistry built up playing together since 1993.

Isaac Brock's singing is no less unstable, delivering his poetic, shockingly candid lyrics as if on the verge of a breakdown. Unable to contain the pain, he gives in to hysteria, repeating some lines obsessively ("Out Of Gas"), chanting others in a singsong ("Long Distance Drunk"), spilling others out of his mouth like poisonous vomit he can't keep down ("Cowboy Dan", "Teeth Like God's Shoeshine", "Shit Luck").

Across the fifteen tracks, the towers of the Westin Hotel are joined by parking lots ("Convenient Parking"), highways, maps drawn by truckers ("Truckers Atlas", ten minutes in which guitar and bass chase each other in fits at shifting speeds) and bankruptcy auctions ("Bankrupt On Selling"), further symbolizing the deadening, annihilating effect of social structures on individuals.

The only remedy to this alienating, lonely society is human connection. Flings, friendships that, despite their fleeting nature, warm the heart in unforgettable musical moments. It's no accident that the most buoyant, cheerful song of the bunch is precisely "Lounge (Closing Time)" (populated by the same characters from "Lounge" in "This Is A Long Ride For Someone With Nothing To Think About", but told from another perspective), in which she enjoys an evening out with company where everyone is tipsy and dancing. The guitars and rhythm section run feverish, but when closing time comes they slump, brushing on melancholy in a magnificent breakdown.

Modest Mouse's second album is a work charged with an incessant, high-voltage electric current, the power lines only cut in furtive moments of peace and tradition. The first is "Jesus Christ Was Only A Child", a stumbling folk tune with a street-corner sing-song feel and a homespun-sounding violin. "Bankrupt On Selling", meanwhile, is a folk song with acoustic guitar brushed gently and scattered electric tears; Brock sounds almost on the verge of crying as he blends, amid clipped words, biblical figures, ruthless shareholders and lost loves.

The closing track, "Styrofoam Boots/It's All Nice On Ice, Allright", also opens under the banner of tradition, starting out as a country song with barely sketched chords before ending in a math-rock rhythmic whirlwind that keeps steadily gaining speed — yet another proof of just how much talent these guys had to spare.

"The Lonesome Crowded West" immortalizes the distinctive sound of a band that would go through several mutations over time, and the songwriting style of one of the most important composers on the indie scene. The album also captures the intimate yet communal mood of a music scene on the margins of Seattle's spotlight, one that isn't made up solely of grunge icons like Mudhoney, nor of the more radical political stances of movements like riot grrrl or Johnson's DIY creed.

The album also voices the discomfort of living in an urban context that is losing its human dimension, and in a landscape — so wild in the Northwest — that is filling up with non-places. Ultimately, it's a howl against shopping malls, shifting relationship dynamics, and crumbling communities. By bringing all of this out into the open, the band matures and becomes "Modest Mouse": from this point on, they embark on an artistic path of spectacular albums that will never again tolerate a moment of lackluster originality.

Everytime you think you’re walking, you’re just moving the ground

Everytime you think you're talking, you're just moving your mouth

Everytime you think you're looking, you're just looking down

(from "Cowboy Dan")

Ride the wave of great music

Add OndaRock to your favorite sources on Google Discover. Don't miss our reviews, milestones and latest news straight in your feed.

Follow on Google

01/12/2019