Modest Mouse – The Lonesome Crowded West (1997)

1. Teeth Like God’s Shoeshine
2. Heart Cooks Brain
3. Convenient Parking
4. Lounge (Closing Time)
5. Jesus Christ Was An Only Child
6. Doin’ the Cockroach
7. Cowboy Dan
8. Trailer Trash
9. Out of Gas
10. Long Distance Drunk
11. Shit Luck
12. Trucker’s Atlas
13. Polar Opposites
14. Bankrupt on Selling
15. Styrofoam Boots / It’s All Nice on Ice, Alright

I figured it was about time I reviewed an artist that almost everyone was familiar with. I mean, I’m sure there are at least some people out there who have never heard of Modest Mouse before, but given that they’ve basically exploded in the past few years with their last two albums I’m willing to bet there are very few people out there who don’t at least recognize their name. I mean, I suppose Jay-Z is the same way, but I’m guessing that the number of people in my social circle who’ve actually listened to his work as a rapper is fairly low.

I’ve had this album for years. I can’t remember when I got it, except that it was for my birthday I think, when I was still in high school. I remember listening to it and liking it, but finding a lot of the songs difficult to really grasp, like there was something up with them that I wasn’t quite getting. It was different than The Moon and Antarctica, and definitely different than Good News For People Who Love Bad News. It sort of slipped into (relative) obscurity for me, and I didn’t listen to it much.

Cut to a couple weeks ago when I came across an internet discussion on whether or not Good News For People Who Love Bad News or We Were Dead Before The Ship Even Sank was Modest Mouse’s best album. The argument seemed silly to me, since both albums represent a huge stylistic shift for Modest Mouse that I really don’t like. I thought about their older albums and, a bit cynically, decided that they weren’t that great either, and that if I listened to them again I probably wouldn’t have many positive things to say about them. I listened to The Moon and Antarctica and sort of agreed with that assessment: it isn’t a bad album, but it can get pretty boring. Then I threw in this one, expecting to be similarly disappointed, and I was blown away.

It’s probably worth noting that, between my last listen and that point, I had become a huge fan of 90s and early 00s hardcore and screamo and had a few months where I listened almost exclusively to it. There’s a HUGE hardcore influence on this album that I never noticed before. It’s indie rock, to be sure, and it has a noticeable Pixies influence as far as the vocals and manic pace are concerned, but the instrumentation is basically hardcore adapted to a less abrasive form. You can hear it in the bass, especially, in the way the guitar parts are written and arranged, in the crescendos and breakdowns. Yeah, there are breakdowns here. Isaac Brock’s vocals take on a new light when you think of them as a replacement for hardcore vocals, rather than as a Black Francis wannabe.

Anyway, I listened to this album and I was floored. Suddenly it all made sense, the chaos seemed a lot more controlled, and – most importantly – many of the aesthetics that I loved about hardcore music survived the transition. I often get annoyed about bands like present-day Modest Mouse, Fall Out Boy, and Panic! At The Disco getting labeled as emo, since they’re so incredibly different from what the term originally meant. I wrote all about this on my Sunny Day Real Estate review. But listening to this, I realized that, for Modest Mouse, the label isn’t so much misapplied as it is applied to the wrong album. This is, in many regards, similar to SDRE. The music is pretty different, but the whole idea of bringing the aesthetics and structures of hardcore music into a different genre remains. If you don’t believe me, just listen to Doin’ the Cockroach.

And it works, beautifully. There isn’t a dull track on this album, which is more than I can say for The Moon and Antarctica, and FAR more than I can say for the decent-at-best recent Modest Mouse output. There’s an raw intensity here that I don’t hear on many albums, period. It’s what I love about hardcore, but hearing it in a different setting almost makes it better and more poignant. “Trailer Trash” is a pretty mellow song, all things considered, until you realize just how much the drums are absolutely POUNDING and just how much tension is brewing just below the surface. The entire song is just waiting to explode, which is pretty common in today’s post-post-rock age, but this was an indie rock song with pop sensibilities written in 1997 doing something that hadn’t really been done well since Sonic Youth (for whom being melodic was never really much of a concern).

Pretty much every song hear gets to me in a personal way. It’s hard for me to find a favorite, or even a top three, and that’s incredibly rare. I think a lot of it is in the honest white trash lyricism. Despite the artistic aspirations and complex songwriting, this is music that empathized, lyrically, with the lowest common denominator. It’s a bit of a post-attribution since I never listened to this much when I was in high school, but I feel like a lot of it perfectly expresses my own adolescent angst in a way that doesn’t trivialize it or make it out to be anything other than angst. And a lot of it is just blue collar angst in general. Take, for example, the following lyrics to Cowboy Dan:

Well, Cowboy Dan’s a major player in the cowboy scene
He goes to the reservation drinks and gets mean
He’s gonna start a war
He hops in his pickup puts the pedal to the floor
And says “I got mine but I want more”

Because, Cowboy Dan’s a major player in the cowboy scene
He goes to the reservation drinks and gets mean
He goes to the desert, fires his rifle in the sky
And says, “God if I have to die you will have to die”

Because, Cowboy Dan’s a major player in the cowboy scene
I didn’t move to the city, the city moved to me
And I want out desperately

When I first heard this it sounded pretty nonsensical. But what you have here is a person set in his ways, wanting to live the classic rural modern cowboy life of pickup trucks and alcohol. Instead, he’s faced with the existential reality of his own mortality and the ever-growing urbanization of the American Midwest. It’s philosophical in plain speech, it doesn’t have to address the specifics of exactly WHY the title character feels this way, it just explains the feelings themselves in their own words, with their implications left to the reader.

The same goes for all the lyrics on the album. Brock has a way of writing lyrics that sound simple and banal, but which are, on further inspection, introspective and philosophical. And the chaos of the music adds to the sense of nihilism, of discontent with life and the world, of all the little elements in life that add together to make it chaotic and nonsensical. But, every now and then, the music slows down, everything becomes more atmospheric and calm. When Cowboy Dan does this, the lyrics are as follows:

Standing in the tall grass
thinking nothing
You know we need oxygen to breathe

The chaos melts away and we’re left with a content with simply living. With grass and oxygen and an empty mind. No analysis, no deliberation, just simply being. Some of the tracks let themselves go into long, almost hypnotic, very-borderling-psychedelic instrumental sequences. No thinking, no doing, nothing complicated, just simply being and enjoying that. From that perspective, the blue collar focus of the lyrics starts making perfect sense – no need to focus on the beauty of high art, there’s plenty of pleasure to be found in simplicity.

Beyond all that, it’s a fun album. There’s some catharsis, some philosophical lines of thought, but most of it is just a joy to listen to. It transitions well between the melodic and the chaotic, and it’s fun to hear where the songs are going. It never loses steam, either. The second half is certainly less intense than the first, but the songs are just as good. If this review seems a bit disjointed, it’s because there’s just so much variety on the album. It’s hard to summarize it in a succinct way. Yet, despite the variation between songs, it still comes across as a cohesive thematic whole. The songs here all belong together.

If you like what Modest Mouse is doing now, I suggest you give this a listen. If you don’t (like me), I still suggest you give it a try. For better or worse, this is entirely different than anything they’ve done since. I had a lot of trouble deciding what song to put here. Like I said, there’s so much variety on the album, it’s hard to find a standout track. I’m going to do something a bit unusual and upload two tracks. Doin’ the Cockroach, because it’s the clearest example of the hardcore influences on the album and may help you notice them when they appear elsewhere, and Cowboy Dan, because I spent more time talking about it than any other tracks, and since it’s very very different than Doin’ the Cockroach. Even if you don’t particularly care for these songs, you may still like others on the album. When I first listened, there were some tracks I loved and some I hated, and while I still don’t love every track on it, I’ve probably loved each individually at some point in time..

Doin’ the Cockroach
Cowboy Dan

(the hard drive I keep my music on wasn’t connected to my computer when I wrote this. Rather than retrieve it, I downloaded the album off the internet, so I could upload the tracks. Just thought you might want to know how lazy the internet has made me)