There's a very fine line between insight and cliché. It's common logic that the things that get said the most seem to ring the most true. But when you've heard them enough, they simply fail to resonate. Sometimes, it takes someone who seems more than a little bit fucked up to see past the countless clichés of rock music and come through with something distinctive and original.
Isaac Brock has always possessed a twisted and brilliant type of insight, both in his lyrics and in the way he presents them. Take "Dramamine," the very first song off of Modest Mouse's very first full-length. With that song, Brock penned one of the most memorable, oddly insightful lyrics of all time: "We kiss on the mouth but still cough down our sleeves." Sung in a whiny nasal voice over acoustic guitar strumming, the lyric would have been nothing short of painful. But Brock blurts it out with helpless but violent disgust, and somehow, it seems more like a spontaneous thought than like a line some hipster poet wrote in his lyrics journal.
Modest Mouse, in their beginnings, were largely preoccupied with the perception of motion and isolation. Especially with This is a Long Drive for Someone with Nothing to Think About, and the early singles that would later become Building Nothing out of Something, the band managed to accomplish what is perhaps one of the most sanctified goals of the musician: to provide a sonic analog for visual and kinetic sensations.
Last year, on their third proper album, the band seriously altered what sensations they were trying to approximate, focusing less on the thoughts one might have while sitting in the backseat of a poorly air-conditioned sedan, and more on thoughts of death and the nature of the universe. Thankfully, the scope of their sound expanded in kind, resulting in the sweeping, gorgeous The Moon and Antarctica.
Everywhere and His Nasty Parlour Tricks, which consists of the four tracks from the Night on the Sun 12" and four additional tracks, would have been a perfectly logical precursor to The Moon and Antarctica. Part dreamy existential reflection and part steady, chugging highway soundtrack, the eight songs on this EP capture bits and pieces of all eras of Modest Mouse's sound, without ever quite achieving the coherency of any of them.
Four of the tracks on Everywhere have already been reviewed by Pitchfork, but it seems appropriate now to just reiterate how excellent some of them are. "Night on the Sun" and "You're the Good Things" (originally released on Night on the Sun) are the two great tracks this disc has to offer. The former stands right up there with any of the band's best album cuts, managing to be both catchy and immensely disconcerting. Lyrically bizarre and alternatingly sparse and dense, musically, "Night on the Sun" encapsulates the best of early and late Modest Mouse. "You're the Good Things" uses the classic Modest Mouse formula of gradually getting more intense and primal as the song progresses, to great effect.
"Willful Suspension of Disbelief," the weakest of the three non-album Night on the Sun tracks, seems just a bit too comfortable sticking to its one-chord shuffle. Spooky, reverb-soaked guitars draw streaks of spooky discordance through an already otherworldly mix. But the song itself still suffers from a lack of change.
And then there are the new tracks. A snippet of "3 Inch Horses, Two-Faced Monsters" appears at the end of "A Different City" on The Moon and Antarctica, and on Everywhere, we finally get to experience the song in its full fiddle-toting glory. With a little help from Califone's Tim Rutilli, "3 Inch Horses, Two Faced Monsters" is probably the closest thing to back-country folk music Modest Mouse has ever recorded. With Brian Deck at the mixer, though, it winds up sounding like back-country folk from beyond the grave. Sadly, "3 Inch Horses" is really just the same thing repeating itself over and over again, and unquestionably outstays its welcome at over four minutes.
"So Much Beauty in Dirt," and its more stripped-down counterpart, "Here It Comes," both suffer from being insanely repetitive without benefiting from the kind of subtle song development that we've come to expect from Modest Mouse. As if that weren't enough, the former also suffers from being almost tragically awkward.
But then there's "The Air," an odd four-plus minute instrumental that basically serves to show off the fact that, hey, Brian Deck is a really fucking good producer. The song samples instrumentation and effects from the Moon and Antarctica sessions and reassembles them into a strange, ethereal series of triggered loops and spacious hums that somehow sounds more organic than electronic. And of course, "I Came as a Rat" makes another gratuitous appearance here, just as it did on Night on the Sun.
Given that "I Came as Rat" appears in identical form to the Moon and Antarctica version, and that the two best songs on this EP were already released on an earlier 12", it's hard to fully embrace Everywhere and His Nasty Parlour Tricks. (Don't even get me started on the title.) If you didn't get a chance to pick up Night on the Sun, or if you're a hardcore vinyl-hater, Everywhere is worth it simply for its two best tracks. Otherwise, be advised that Everywhere essentially plays out as throwaways from The Moon and Antarctica.
