I’ve been putting off talking about today’s album for quite a while because I feel like I ought to have all kinds of things to say, but just can’t figure out what they are. Modest Mouse has been my favorite currently-existing band since Carissa’s Wierd broke up (and perhaps before that). They’re the inspiration for the name of this blog, even. I’ve talked about them a few times before, about what they mean to me, and about the wonder that I still feel every time I listen to a song like “Trailer Trash” or “Teeth Like God’s Shoeshine” or, yes, even “Float On.” With their new record, I so wanted to be able to do this again, to find something to cherish, to listen to endlessly on repeat. While Good News… never hit me nearly as hard as some of their other stuff, I still anticipated amazing things.
Sadly, there is nothing amazing here. We Were Dead Before The Ship Even Sank is not a bad album and if it came from anyone other than Modest Mouse, I would be pretty excited about it. But compared to the magic, the transcendence that infused everything they did before, I can’t help but wonder what might have been.
The first thing that hits me is the way it all feels artificial, which is not necessarily bad but is so antithetical to what made me love Modest Mouse in the first place. Whether it was self-loathing (“Broke”), whimsy (“, dark irony (“Polar Opposites”), forlorn reflection (“Baby Blue Sedan”), simple wonder (“So Much Beauty in Dirt”), or even a world-weary yet overwhelming happiness (“Float On”), it was all so real you could cut yourself with it. Even on a record like Moon and Antarctica, where the emotion was distance, you could feel it, the long spaces, the all-encompassing emptiness.
Here, there is precious little of that. Is it the influence of Johnny Marr? Is it simply an element of growing up – they have found themselves in a place that no longer speaks to me in the same way? Is it possible that Isaac is simply too happy? After all, the one emotion that is far easier to sense here than anywhere else is just a basic joy. The music retains a certain harshness, a dissonance that reflects on still being somewhat out of sync with “normal” reality, but the main difference between songs like “Dashboard” or “Florida” and earlier ones like “A Different City” is a sense of optimism – music made out of joy. And I certainly don’t begrudge him that, but it’s perhaps a sad comment on great art that it is mostly made in the narrow space between depression and total breakdown.
It should perhaps not be surprising that one of my all-time favorite lines from “Teeth Like God’s Shoeshine” fit perfectly onto Lonesome Crowded West but would feel distinctly out of place here: “the sense of happiness that comes from hurting deep down inside.”
Of course, “Float On” is one of my favorite Modest Mouse songs, and it is literally a statement about beginning to understand that happiness might be found outside of pain. But the difference, I think, is that “Float On” teeters on the edge. It is so great because it is revelatory. It’s far more amazing to suddenly realize you can be happy than to simply find it in your everyday life.
I realize that my “review” so far has consisted of talking about old songs I loved and some personal psychoanalysis, but there’s not really any help for it. I’m just too close to Modest Mouse, I love them too much, and can’t be even a little bit objective. I will say that the one song that soundly defeats all my complaints is the tenderly ragged “Missed the Boat” which conveys every bit of the beautiful absurdity that is humanity, with a sly wink.
And, apart from “Fly Trapped in a Jar” which I have only forced myself to listen to the whole way through once (but which Hunter likes a lot, apparently) and “Education”, there’s not really a bad song here.
Sure, I could do with less production, less songs that sound far too close to Franz Ferdinand (“We’ve Got Everything,” “Dashboard,” etc.), and I’m not sure whether Isaac’s voice has actually changed this much or if that’s part of the studio trickery, but what happened to the beautifully un-nuanced, lispy, voice that tore you to shreds? And I could do without the Tom Waits impersonations. But when I just listen to it without expectations, I do continue to find things to enjoy, and my opinion slowly grows. It will never be my favorite from them, or even close, but there is a lot of good stuff here.
One final recommendation. “Spitting Venom” is what I was hoping the whole record would be like. Not that I wanted 10 carbon-copies of this song, but it is by far the best example of their “new sound” – it’s wildly different from anything else they’ve done, but retains the core elements that make them so great. It lilts, it explodes, Isaac goes nuts, and then there’s a glorious four-minute coda that goes back and redevelops every element of the first half, spitting them out as something completely new. If the whole record had songs of this quality, I really could have fallen in love all over again.
When I mentioned it in passing a while ago, I gave it a “solid, but not particularly impressive 7.1.” I’m willing to upgrade that to a “tantalizing, but not entirely satisfying 7.6” now. I’m glad one of my favorite bands is getting hundreds of thousands of new fans, but there’s a certain sadness in knowing that most of them will never hear “Other People’s Lives” and might not even like it if they did.
MP3s:
Missed the Boat
Live:
Life Goes On (an early, extended version of “Float On”)
From Building Nothing Out of Something:
Never Ending Math Equation
From Lonesome Crowded West:
Trailer Trash
Teeth Like God’s Shoeshine