Weekend Listening: Modest Mouse
Given their recent success, it's funny to think Modest Mouse
has been kicking around since 1992. They hailed from Issaquah - a
sprawling, cul-de-sacked nightmare which formed a dystopian and
claustrophobic vision on earlier records they've never been able to match. Witness their quaint commentary on
consumer culture: “Let’s all have another Orange Julius/Thick syrup
standing in lines/The malls are the soon to be ghost towns/So long,
farewell, goodbye...well do you need a lot of what you got to survive?” on "Teeth Like God's Shoeshine." That left quite the impression on my wide-eyed
teenage self in the Pacific Northwest as Wal-Martians attacked, nature
was destroyed for bankrupt golf courses, or, as the funny lyrics say in
“Novocaine Stain,”… “More housing developments go up/Named after the
things they replace/So welcome to Minnow Brook/And welcome to Shady
Space/And it all seems a little abrupt/No I don’t like this change of
pace.”
On the aptly titled second album “Lonesome Crowded West,” frontman
Isaac Brock spoke of, and perhaps to, “modest mouse-like people,” a line
he cribbed from Virginia Woolf. These were characters like Cowboy Dan,
who goes to the reservation, drinks and gets mean because he “didn’t
move to the city/the city moved to me/and I want out desperately.” Brock
was stricken with rural dementia and this violent composition speaks
for inhabitants who were displaced by growth while everybody looked the
other way. After the jump is the visceral single "Never Ending Math Equation" that, in one song, bounces from metaphysics to malaise. And it rocks. Enjoy.
