It's just a matter of time until a West Coast punk band with the name of "The ______s" releases an album called For Nick Cater. It's just a matter of time until an indie rock collective devoted to resurrecting the sound of Led Zeppelin arises in Olympia, Athens or D.C. It's just a matter of time before Superchunk releases an album with "keyboards and loops and stuff." It's only a matter of time before Dan Fogelberg is somehow dubbed a misunderstood genius in Chicago's avant-pop circles. Rock music has sunk to some pretty low levels recently.
But lately, I've experienced a little metanoia; the thin jaded layers that built up in 1999 have flaked away. Chalk those layers up to loitering in the grime of mid-20's doldrums. I'm just in love with music. This is why I eat hotdogs and oatmeal and type until 4:00am instead of cutting up cadavers at Emory. And what sort of angel-driven crane has pulled me up from the quagmires, you ask? A handful of bands. One of which, of course, is Modest Mouse.
I've listened to Modest Mouse grow progressively better and more profound since their 1996 debut, This is a Long Drive for Someone with Nothing to Think About. I read Pitchfork's official "weirdest interview ever" with Modest Mouse before I was even on the staff. I've witnessed Isaac Brock scream into his guitar pickups inside a packed bar in Atlanta while my then-girlfriend got sick and fainted. But it wasn't until Building Nothing Out of Something slipped into my possession that I became convinced that Modest Mouse, strangely, might be saviors.
Not that The Lonesome Crowded West wasn't amazing. It was just a tad overlong, and the climate has worsened in those couple of short years since. Here's a band for us to wave at the UK and sneer, "Haha, you don't have this!" For Modest Mouse are inherently and inseparably American. Isaac Brock's brain is fed through the umbilical of strip malls, religion, blues, prairies, automobiles, and dysfunction. The trio is bare, raw, howling, and beautiful.
There's always been a visceral thrill in rock's revolutionaries that comes from a twinge of danger. In Modest Mouse, this danger stems from a sense of rural dementia-- the sort of fear Flannery O'Connor and James Dickey would love to mill. The roar of punk splashes against the melancholy of roots music. There are trailers in Modest Mouse's past, and likely their future.
Though Building Nothing Out of Something merely compiles old singles and rarities, it might be the best Modest Mouse release for newcomers' initiation, as well as instant gratification for long time fans. This batch of songs is easily their most varied. "Never Ending Math Equation" tick-tocks to a screeching turntable crescendo. "Medication" floats a slow, crystalline guitar line over muted field recordings of traffic, foghorns, and railroad bells before trotting into an acoustic coda with blithe organs. The most beautiful near-seven minutes of Modest Mouse's career rumbles throughout "Workin' on Leavin' the Livin'"-- a psychedelic testimonial to the afterlife. "Sleepwalkin'" mines the 1950s ballad of the same name, but sets the affair in an underwater chamber of whale-call guitars and aching melodies. And a suitable meltdown climaxes in the closer, "Other People's Lives," when Brock treats his guitar like solder.
Yet what truly bowls me over is the savant-like lucidity in Brock's pinpoint prose. Most people in their young 20s can't nail the malaise, prayers, frustrations, and joys of life. The record opens with the brilliant lines, "I'm the same/ As I was when I was six years old/ And oh my god I feel so damn old/ But do I really feel anything?" Brock may look like a gas station employee but he rambles off quips like, "The universe works on a math equation that never really ever even ever is in it and/ Infinity spirals out creation." One doesn't normally expect metaphysics from a lumberjack rock band. And this line comes from the same song.
Everything is delivered with utmost sincerity, is perfectly phrased, and drips with emotion. As Ryan observed, "Anyone else would put those lyrics on top of mopey minor chords." Anyone else would simply fail if they tried this. Terse, original observations are delivered throughout. "Workin' on Leavin' the Livin'" refrains the lament: "In heaven everything is fine/ In heaven everything's alright." This only works for the fact that Brock sounds ready to die over guitars that cry and shimmer.
An undercurrent of honesty, and the juxtapositions and surprises are what make Modest Mouse. Forget the fact they have the name of a 1970s Oxford prog band. This band, one of the few truly original voices in modern rock music, grants me visions of a near-future where their major label debut strikes that new, long-awaited revolution. And in 2001, I want to hear people asking, "Who's going to be the next Modest Mouse?"
