Modest Mouse are a 25 year old rock band and Issaquah, Washington's most invaluable cultural export. While the nineties Seattle scene was exploding with young, ambitious bands like Nirvana and Pearl jam, Modest Mouse (Isaac Brock, Jeremiah Green, Eric Judy) were working obscurely in a small shed owned by guitarist Brock.
By shutting themselves away from the mainstream music world they were able to embrace unorthodox influences and create a totally unique sound. Their six studio albums can be daunting to tackle, but with this guide you'll have easy access to the main themes and musical signatures that the band have developed throughout their innovative career.
1. This Is a Long Drive for Someone with Nothing to Think About
Album opener Dramamine is a succinct expression of lyricist Isaac Brock's favorite lyrical topic: travel. Jeremiah Green's drumming and Eric Judy's unorthodox bass style create a steadiness that mimics the feeling of driving down a highway for hours, watching the same billboards and exit signs pass by. Throughout this album Brock continually uses the idea of traveling without a destination as a metaphor to reflect the state his life is in. This is most evident in key tracks Custom Concern, Tundra/Desert and Ohio. Those three songs set up the feelings of complacency and frustration with the lifelessness of society that are this album's bread and butter.
2. The Lonesome Crowded West
Here we have more travel imagery, but with one important difference. On their second release Brock finds his prior complacency becoming cynicism. This is reflected in the music by focusing on how the topics of religion, consumerism and depression all react together. The Lonesome Crowded West does this by exchanging This Is a Long Drive's exhaustion for outward and inward anger. This is most notable on the tracks Jesus Christ Was an Only Child, Doin' the Cockroach and Out of Gas.
The album also asserts the realization that the American myth of the Wild West has been paved over and turned into a parking lot. Now, instead of untamed wilderness, we have the same convenience stores, chain restaurants and decaying strip malls. However, there is a ray of hope in the penultimate track. Bankrupt on Selling is a sincere and thoroughly melancholy look at how bitterness is often used as a salve to cover up real pain.
3. The Moon & Antarctica
This newfound honest sincerity leads the band to widen their scope from Earthbound driving to interstellar travel. The tone of Modest Mouse's sound has now gone from complacent to cynical to lonely. The tracks 3rd Planet, Dark Center of the Universe and The Stars Are Projectors use the massive scope of the universe as a powerful metaphorical tool to describe human loneliness. Brock does this lyrically by showing how the interior thoughts, dreams and aspirations of every human being seem just as vast and infinite as the universe.
The title is a reference to the fact that the moon and antarctica are the only places humans have been where we cannot survive. Late in the album you get the tracks Lives and Life Like Weeds, which overcome the sadness at the album's core to remind the listener that "we're alive for the first time" and that "we're alive for the last time" so we should live before we die.
4. Good News for People Who Love Bad News
Modest Mouse's career can effectively be split in two with their most recent albums representing a shift in style away from their early work. Whereas the early music was lo-fi and gritty, their output over the second half of their career is polished and significantly more hopeful. Look no further than this album's lead single Float On. It's the song that changed absolutely everything for the band. The single was not only a huge success on the charts, but it also led Good News...to achieve platinum selling success.
The band used this release to move away from the pervading sense of skepticism that characterized their first three records and into a state of blissful acceptance. No where is this more evident than on the songs The World At Large, The View and One Chance.
5. We Were Dead Before the Ship Even Sank
The tone of bliss continues over to this album through an even stronger reliance on pop polish, optimism and a newfound nautical focus. The former Smiths' guitarist Johnny Marr joined the band for this album only to help them craft every moment so it plays as seamlessly as possible. The songs Parting of the Sensory, Spitting Venom and People As Places As People reflect the refined tone of the newer releases without neglecting the bite of the older material.
Parting of the Sensory and People As Places As People in particular accomplish this exceptionally well by using circular imagery. They paint a portrait of the idea that no matter how far you travel you'll always arrive at a place that looks identical to the one you left. Likewise, they portray birth and death as two sides of the same coin.
6. Stranger to Ourselves
Their most recent release finds the band combining the thematic interests of their early work and newer work, while furthering the refinement of their sound. Album opener Strangers to Ourselves lays out the main theme of society being a force that isolates us from ourselves. Lead singles Lampshades on Fire, The Ground Walks, with Time in a Box and Coyotes drive this home by showing that when we separate ours lives from nature and the present moment we lose the ability to fully realize what kind of person we are.
Which Modest Mouse album is your favorite?
