Isaac Brock and his friends were teenagers when they wrote the songs on Sad Sappy Sucker. Think about the shitty poems you wrote when you were young (I have one that plagiarizes Green Day's "Longview"!) and then listen to the splintered and elusive songs collected on this Modest Mouse release. Clearly, Brock had a head start on seeing things differently from the rest of us.
That is one of the more profound takeaways from the so-called Great Lost Modest Mouse album, a 24-track collection of occasionally brilliant odds and ends that was spared the fate of being the band's introduction to the world. Delays forced them to move on and record This Is a Long Drive for Someone With Nothing to Think About before Sad Sappy Sucker could be released. From a historical vantage point, they lucked out-- Sucker has its moments, but they would take a quantum leap from here to This Is a Long Drive.
Nonetheless, a few facets of Modest Mouse's unmistakable sound glint through on these songs, recorded with Calvin Johnson for K Records. There are those eerily pinging bent guitar harmonics, for one, a noise that sounded entirely alien at the time, as well as the way the guitar and bass circled warily around each other without locking, two halves of an endlessly spiraling argument. Jeremiah Green was already an astoundingly talented drummer, one who could fill every inch of available space without overwhelming Brock's harmonically simple songs.
And Brock-- well, first of all, he sounds astoundingly young. His lisp, which would grow a little less noticeable over time, is almost painfully pronounced on Sad Sappy Sucker-- "Mice Eat Cheese"'s title is rendered "mithe eat cheethe." His singing is frail and nervous, and the words are often obscured by mumbling. The lyrics that do surface are like little placeholders for all of Brock's future lyrical obsessions-- "you can see that birds and worms don't get along," in "Worms Vs. Birds"; "Looks like accounting's not accountable for anything or anyone at all/ Jonny took the fall," he yelps in "Race Car Grin You Ain't No Landmark". The ringing opening guitar figure for "It Always Rains on a Picnic" would pop up almost unchanged on *Long Drive'*s "Talking Shit About a Pretty Sunset"-- in fact, the former song sounds like a dry run for the latter. It's absorbing listening, but hardly consequential.
When Sad Sappy Sucker first saw release in 2001, on the heels of the monumental The Moon & Antarctica, it felt more like a yellowing sketchbook of curiosities bequeathed to diehard fans than a proper album. Nine years later, now on Brock's Glacial Pace label, it still feels that way. It's being reissued at the same time as the 1997 EP The Fruit That Ate Itself, and taken together, you get a pleasantly bracing aerial view of a young band's gradual development. The Fruit That Ate Itself has some of the band's most abrasive moments-- the title track, in particular, is harrowing, just a descending bassline and Brock's screaming his unhinged napkin poetry ("Take a drive in the wrong hand lane/ Got bad breath talking about fresh rain") until he's hoarse. But it also had the first hints of the band's fascination with sound effects and overdubs-- the skirling backwards guitars that show up repeatedly point to the frozen-tundra ambience of their later works.
Brock and his bandmates didn't alter a thing for these reissues; there are no bonus tracks, no new songs. Neither of them is an essential Modest Mouse release, but if they provide anything new to us in 2010, it's a useful window back into the pre-Internet era of indie rock. The songs on Sad Sappy Sucker dribbled their way out into the world on 7"s and compilations-- 500 or 1,000 people bought them, and that was exactly the right audience for the music. Modest Mouse then moved on to the next project, honing their voice. In the Internet hothouse, improving your way into a larger audience is a more fitful, lurching affair, one that often happens in combustible bursts. For a young, unsteady group like Modest Mouse, being able to kick around the Pacific Northwest while working on their songwriting feels crucial to their development-- they had a long way to go from Sad Sappy Sucker to The Lonesome Crowded West and The Moon & Antarctica, and it's hard to imagine they would have gotten there the same way today. Obscurity smarts, but sometimes it can be a useful cocoon.
