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5.0 out of 5 stars
modest mouse - tinymixtapes, Jan 18 2008
"Traveling, swallowing Dramamine." Modest Mouse have always been about movement. They travel. They are a traveling circus. Their early albums were long drives exploring interstates (an old photo of a young Isaac, with mutton chops and razor pimples, shows him steering a truck with one hand, the American expanse behind his profile). Then they embarked on a celestial journey, accelerating through dark matter and ash. They took seasonal drives, breezy and relaxed, seeing sights like the Teton Range and white trash. With We Were Dead Before the Ship Even Sank, we start off at a pit stop -- no, a semi-permanent setting up of shop. Stasis. Empty the covered wagon, boys. Play the same saloon every Thursday-Saturday. Be a jug band, a honky-tonk ensemble, a barbershop quartet on Sunday mornings outside an unlisted church of unknown faith. With fuel prices what they are, who can blame them for pulling over?
After the stint on land, Modest Mouse took to the salty-breathing ocean. It drew them in. The excursion went on. High water rose, and they were wrecked. After floating in the Pacific, clenching petrol barrels for two weeks, the band was rescued. The album cover depicts an anchored Montgolfier hot air balloon. Modest Mouse has gotten off the ground -- they aren't tethered to any spikes in the mud. They've gotten off the sea's frothy crest -- no fishes snipping at their feet. The band huddles in the wicker basket, careful their hairs don't singe on the liquid propane burner. Brock, like a sheep, nibbles imperturbably on a wicker straw. Jeremiah Green and Eric Judy cower in the corner, like a cock and a duck. Brock keeps a flint striker woven in his guitar strings, right above the nut. The anchor doesn't keep them down; it's more of a charm. They soar. "Traveling, swallowing Dacron."
In theory, it's the purest of magic -- a spectacle from Pullman, WA to Avignon: A supply of taffeta (Marr) and cordage (Brock), producing astonishing results. Johnny Marr fits so perfectly in the wicker basket that his contribution goes almost completely unnoticed. This is a good thing. He doesn't change this band; he maintains it.
The band has trekked the BNSF Railway Hi-Line from Spokane to Havre. Now they take us to Florida, cruise-controlling past belly-up crocodiles. The album was recorded in Oxford, Mississippi and mixed in Portland, Oregon -- magnetic tape, like handlebar streamers, rippling from the Gulf of Mexico to the Pacific Northwest. They take us to unascertainable elsewheres -- terra incognitae.
One can see Isaac Brock standing behind his microphone, cocksure, with his legs spread. He's dressed in clothes made out of wasps. These songs he sings rarely fail to turn sinister. Musically, with these instruments and these arrangements, nearly every track is of peak interest. Brock has mentioned he's indebted to jug bands, with their bottles, buzz saws, clackers, and contraptions, and those sounds spring up on this album -- spry and nimble. When Brock can't muster the words, he forces any utterance from his mouth -- oh-acklah, clack glack-ah, whuh-hoo. They are crawly harmonies.
If "Float On" was sprightly, "Dashboard" is a cool blue kinesis. "People as Places as People" is like fresh laundry billowing on the clothesline. "Fly Trapped in a Jar" takes a Clash-like diversion (a tire-squealing detour) into Brock's harsh rendition/revision of "Rapper's Delight." It's the most hip-hop the band has been since those scratches on The Lonesome Crowded West. And James Mercer, friend and kind fellow, shows support with backup vocals ("Florida," "Missed the Boat," "We've Got Everything"), sounding like an English-accented robot built in Albuquerque. What Mercer adds to the songs is immeasurable. Like Marr, Mercer blends in like a blood brother.
People have been waiting for Modest Mouse to falter, for the muffler to sputter, for the hot air balloon to brush the tops of trees, but it has yet to happen. A diagnosis of their discography proves how firm and substantial the band is. Some thought Good News For People Who Love Bad News was a slip, but it wasn't. Neither is We Were Dead Before the Ship Even Sank. It is solid, like a landmass. With each song, rain washes away waste and buried treasure emerges from the dirt. Erosion reveals the wheeze of a pump organ, hammer-ons like bird chirps, and those trademark slides, skid-marking the highway. Listen to how Brock sings well and hell during the chorus on "Missed the Boat." Listen to the puff-puff-puff-fah of the horn on "Spitting Venom."
Music dignitaries and primordial fans will be contented. If they're smart, they'll rejoice. Modest Mouse's career, as an epic poem, began: Isaac from Issaquah. The stanzas continue to unravel. Travel.
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4.0 out of 5 stars
Sinking to the other side, Aug 29 2007
With their last album, Modest Mouse came closer to the mainstream than ever before. They had an MTV video, for crying out loud.
Apparently that rankled the band. because the follow-up "We Were Dead Before The Ship Even Sank" is more densely bizarre and quirky. There's a token single near the beginning, but you might as well skip over it to the high-octane rock and blurry psychedelic layers of sound.
It opens with a skittering accordion solo. But soon it's melodramatic tsunami of raging riffs, with Isaac Brock howling madly, "Well, treat me like disease/Like the rats and the fleas," and faux-laughing. Someone sounds like he's into the bottle, and has decided to scare everybody with what he found there.
It's a very weird intro, which is sound even stranger next to the weak, bouncy powerpop of "Dashboard." That one seems to be made specifically so the album will have a single, so the band can focus on what they really want. Once that single is out of the way, Brock and Co. segue into the dark percussion-pop of "Fire It Up," which is a taste of what's to come.
The rest of the music sticks to the off-kilter quality of the first and third songs -- rattly ballads, meandering high-octane rock, shimmering psychedelica, smoothly haunting pop, and hard-rockers that shift into ambient balladry.... or vice versa. It ends with the catchy, quirky finale -- "Invisible," which opens with fiery, tight riffs, but cascades into darker territory after the halfway mark.
I don't see how Brock and Co. could have become more UNLIKE an MTV band without leaving behind every shred of their previous sound. Sometimes "We Were Dead Before..." can be catchy, but it doesn't really want to make you dance -- it wants to tangle you in its odd melodies, weird singing, and oblique lyrics about flies, tails and death. Lots of death.
Those weird melodies are what ties the album together -- Modest Mouse sticks to fiery electric riffs, bass and drums, flavoured with maracas, accordion, keyboard and handclaps. But they hardly ever use their instruments in a "normal" way -- just when you think you know how the song will go, it changes style, tempo or tune. Heck, "Fly Trapped in a Jar" opens with a guitar imitating a fly.
However, it's the deceptively quiet "Parting Of The Sensory" that really shows how determined they are to be unique. It starts as a folky little song, blossoms into a weird ambient-violin pop song, and finally explodes into a thumping acoustic dance number that cuts off in mid-word.
Isaac Brock is just as dramatic and unpredictable as the music -- he yowls, he sings, he roars, he rambles, and he laughs (", "Ah ha HA! Ah ha HA!") like a demented sailor. His uneven style certainly fits the tone of the lyrics, which sound like a depressed Lewis Carroll wrote them ("We had docked in dark, so we didn't read what the sign read/Though simple enough, it was demure and tough/"The ground needs to be fed").
Modest Mouse's "We Were Dead Before the Ship Even Sank" is a moody, colourful extravaganza of unpredictable rock'n'roll, though it suffers from a weak beginning. Definitely worth hearing.
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4.0 out of 5 stars
Modest Achievement., Jul 4 2007
Compared to "Good News For People Who Love Bad News", this album is admittedly, not as astronomical. This said, how many albums live up to the quality the aforementioned album? Very few. It's an indie classic. For a band that has been around for so long, I am amazed they can put out an album of this caliber. It does not, by any means, live up to their former surrealism, and yet still manages to be a perfectly good album.
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