modest mouse by collin david

A Week With Modest Mouse's "We Were Dead Before The Ship Even Sank": Day 2

5 April 2007
tell your friends... tell your friends...

Words by Gabe Durham // Illustration by Collin David

And none of that is to say that it’s the voice that makes the band. Modest Mouse’s distinct sound has had everything to do with the exaggerated guitar string-bending that matches Brock’s exaggerated voice-bending and unpredictable song structures that match the unpredictable lyrics. They’ve had the gift of blend their whole career. When the DJ scratching appeared at the end of “Never Ending Math Equation,” it wasn’t the nod to hip-hop the nu-metal folks would soon employ and wear out, it was another inventive layer of fury. With each successive album, Modest Mouse has continued to broaden their musical palette. Take We Were Dead‘s “Parting of the Sensory”. It’s the immediate stand-out track, the one I’ve got to hear when I see them live, and like so many of their best songs, it’s about death. As Brock grows increasingly passionate over acoustic guitar, they slowly add ambient strings, chimes, and distorted chords until the drums usher in violin and banjo and build a ferocious rhythmic climax that is part ritual sacrifice, part hoedown.

Modest Mouse has done Good News and We Were Dead to a click. The steady rhythm is a smart move for a band that seldom falls into the danger of sounding conventional. (The exception is the ultra-straightforward “Fire It Up”.) They could easily spill into excess, and sometimes did pre-_Moon and Antarctica_. When it’s not shining in lo-fi brilliance, The Lonesome Crowded West sounded like a myriad of haphazard song ideas tossed into the same track. There is also “Little Motel,” a soft break-up ballad that disarms suspicion with poignant lyrics. Verses reveal a couple individually realizing their growing apart (“I can see it on your eyes as I taste your lips / They both tell me that we’re better than this”) between simple repeated choruses of “That’s what I’m waiting for.” “Motel” ends with the observation of each simultaneously wanting to matter to the other and wanting the other not to exist. Astute, no? Not to be labeled softies, the band sandwiched the song between “Education” and “Steam Engenius,” the album’s two least accessible tracks and returned to obtuse circular similes such as “like a rickshaw getting pulled around by another rickshaw”.

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