And he dutifully obliges with “at home with the ghosts of the national parks.” After the opening line of “Coyotes” – “coyotes tiptoe in the snow after dark” – you just get the feeling that Brock is going to make the next line something with “park” in it. Unfortunately, this nagging sense of self-parody reappears throughout the record. After that joke of a song, even the pleasing guitar leads of a track like “Ansel” are overshadowed by its lyrics, some of which go “you can’t know/well you can’t really know/how was I supposed to know/how the hell would I know?” These sort of frustratingly obtuse couplets are vintage Brock territory, but after a song like “Pistol,” they almost feel like self-parody. 1996),” quite simply the worst song Modest Mouse has ever recorded.Ī fuzzy, pitch-shifted calamity with lyrics trashy enough that Kings of Leon would cringe, it’s a disastrous misstep that decimates the album’s early momentum. “Sh*t In Your Cut” tries to recreate the surrealist, infinite-highway type atmosphere of the band’s early work, but despite some strong guitar work from Brock, the song sinks under the album’s muscly production. But, in its comfortable but strong recreation of all the band’s sonic trademarks, it also manages to stay on-point, reminding the listener of what made them like Modest Mouse in the first place.īut from this strong one-two opening punch, “Strangers to Ourselves” endures a rapid decline. From the chord progression, to the stacatto “ba ba bas,” to the harmonic-driven guitar leads, it’s Modest Mouse delivering the most Modest Mouse-like song you could possibly imagine. While it never quite builds to a payoff, its string-driven melancholy punches through the album’s high-cost production and creates an intimacy that the album as a whole sorely lacks.įollowing this is “Lampshades on Fire,” a track that is such a Modest Mouse song that the band may as well stick a copyright symbol next to the song’s title. The title track, which opens the album, is one of the release’s more daring and rewarding pieces. It is an album that at once manages to sound incredibly familiar and distantly impersonal. While the songs on “Strangers to Ourselves,” released March 17, could not be mistaken for the work of anyone else, they are the least confident batch of the band’s career. Even after they became one of the first success stories of independent rock in the 2000s with their 2004 album, “Good News For People Who Love Bad News,” the original trio of Brock, Judy and Green remained Modest Mouse’s anchor, keeping a sense of exhilaration and adventurousness in their increasingly commercial and complex material.īut the seemingly permanent departure of Eric Judy and the near-decade long gap between albums has taken something deeply tangible from Modest Mouse. What’s important about those records is that they were the works of a cohesive group. The band’s first three albums, 1996’s “This Is A Long Drive For Someone With Nothing To Think About,” 1997’s “The Lonesome Crowded West” and “The Moon & Antarctica,” from 2000, not only stood out as masterpieces during one of rock music’s worst creative droughts, they played a large role in setting the template for the blanket term of “indie rock.” Judy and Green perfectly set the stage for Isaac Brock, as deeply an idiosyncratic guitarist, singer and lyricist as any in rock. His intricate, melodic bass lines formed a formidable foundation with drummer Jeremiah Green’s complicated, but always-precise rhythms. Seemingly absent from almost every conversation surrounding Modest Mouse’s first new LP in eight years, “Strangers to Ourselves,” has been the recent departure of Eric Judy, the band’s former bassist and one of its three founding members.
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