Modest Mouse
The Lonesome Crowded West
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NATN Recommended
Modest Mouse
The Lonesome Crowded West
Up, 1997
RiYL: Pavement, Pixies, Sonic Youth, Built To Spill, Gang Of Four |
The Lonesome Crowded West is a record of undeniable excellence and unlimited frustrations. It could probably be a better album but Modest Mouse are too good of a band. Does that make sense? If you've heard the album, I think it does. The first third is truly blockbusting, rocketing off with "Teeth Like God's Shoeshine," a tune which manages to be inspiring, surprising, riveting, and bone-rattlingly catchy for all of its seven minutes and continuing on through the hip-hopping indie comp smash "Heart Cooks Brain" and the weirdly anthemic "Convenient Parking." (In post-postmodern American, don't the men who hold the best parking spaces hold all the power? Or am I applying the song to life rather than life to the song?)
But then it goes on...and on...and on. The band is too ambitious to pull up short and too full of ideas to be able to tie everything to a single theme and give the album anything resembling flow. But it's OK. You have to put some effort in, but it's all going to be OK.
The record benefits plenty from using the random function on your CD player. There are many, many excellent songs buried in The Lonesome Crowded West's innards, including a trilogy of quality blue-collar fight songs, "Shit Luck," "Long Distance Drunk," and the weirdly majestic "Trailer Trash" ("Goddamn I hope I pass / High school this year"). Isaac Brock seems to have hit upon a defining concept for the album, given up, and just sort of thrown everything together as is, leaving the occasional repeated lyrics or image to bewilder the listener. Jesus Christ is "working real hard to make Internet cash," buffalo are diving off of cliffs all around, and the truckers are growing restless, doin' The Cockroach until "Closing Time." There may be a larger picture, bub, but you're never going to grasp it.
Modest Mouse are the Jackson Pollock of indie rock, throwing everything up against a canvas and hoping it sticks. Country fiddle? Sure. Turntables? Good thinking! Wack-ass Tom Morello effects pedal solos? Bring 'em on! Sometimes layered, sometimes raw, sometimes spastically refusing to settle down, sometimes leaning in for protracted, mantric chanting, The Lonesome Crowded West is about as easy to logically pin down as its title. And it's good, so good. Sure, it's well-nigh impossible to make it to one end of the other of this thing in one sitting, but the same can be said of our fair nation. Modest Mouse are America. Start in the middle and just sort of feel your way around.
MARK T.R. DONOHUE | Mark T.R. Donohue is a prolific freelance writer whose areas of expertise include Rockies baseball, video games, genre television, English soccer, and pub rock. He lives in Colorado, where he cultivates the largest and creepiest private collection of Alyson Hannigan memorabilia in the Mountain West.