modest mouse by collin david

A Week With Modest Mouse's "We Were Dead Before The Ship Even Sank": Day 5

12 April 2007
tell your friends... tell your friends...

Words by Gabe Durham // Illustration by Collin David

Between We Were Dead Before the Ship Even Sank and Neon Bible, March was a very good month for catharsis. It’s unfair and inevitable that when the same two albums are in my car stereo for weeks, I end up comparing them to each other. But whereas the Arcade Fire won me over song by song and I haven’t begun to get tired of it, Modest Mouse has found me skipping all over the place lately, rarely letting four songs play in succession. And I’m surprised by the ones I skip to. I called “Fire It Up” “ultra-straightforward” on Day 2, but now I never skip past it. Until now, Dennis Herring could have gotten a reputation for leading darker bands to the sunny side. After Jars of Clay’s brooding Much Afraid alienated fans of their light first album, Herring produced the quirky pop If I Left the Zoo with its radio-ready single, “Unforgetful You”. In the same year, he produced Counting Crows’ accessible This Desert Life. Songs like “Hanginaround” were void of the anguish found on Recovering the Satellites. Left the Zoo and Desert Life didn’t quite measure up to previous releases, but sometimes bands have to cheer up to survive. For Modest Mouse, the Herring touch on Good News For People Who Love Bad News made them better than ever — more vulnerable and more accessible.

If Good News was Modest Mouse with their guard down, We Were Dead is Modest Mouse with their guard up then down then way up then back down, switching music genres and lyrical transparency nearly every other song. In the three weeks I’ve been listening to We Were Dead, I’ve found my listening experience to be different nearly every time. Sometimes I love the way it jerks me around, the way “Little Motel” is a polar opposite of “Steam Engenius,” and other times these jarring musical shifts leave me seasick. If anything ties the disc together, it’s that voice. When the devil sings, he sounds a lot more like a Modest Mouse song than anything by Cannibal Corpse (no matter how sexually torturous Corpse’s song titles are). Because the devil isn’t unbridled rage, he’s temperamental yet seductive. The whisper, the insane laugh, the faint lisp, the yelp. Somehow all of Brock’s personas work together to create something both dark yet accessible: We Were Dead was the #1 album in America last week. Who saw that one coming?

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