Modest Mouse - Good News For People Who Love Bad News
Coming off their last masterpiece, “The Moon and Antarctica,” Isaac Brock and company certainly set up for themselves a hard act to follow. As a result, it’s not surprising that only six years later does the next Modest Mouse album surface: “Good News For People Who Love Bad News.” Amazingly, the band holds steady to their own high standard. Fully on par with their last record, Modest Mouse now joins the slim ranks of bands who can make epic, best-selling, and darned-near perfect albums more than once. You know, the kind of records that aren’t just records—to the indie community, they’re truly events, cultural statements. And speaking of Epic, that’s exactly the major label that our boys have vaulted into. Remarkably, the band used their extensive time in the studio, frequent guest appearances, and overall big label mumbo jumbo—to their benefit! This multi-layered group effort did not get turned into bombast or get stagnated by money.
Although “Good News…” is remarkably similar to Modest Mouse’s last outing, there are some slight differences. First off, the band has produced an even more unified album than “The Moon and Antarctica”: every detail, every melody, every track all work towards a greater whole, which of course is a sign of a great album. There’s not a weak track on the whole thing. Also, Brock still is stricken with the problem of evil and his lyrics run rampant with death-obsessed imagery; yet for all this, he may have gotten a little more optimistic. The opening song, “The World At Large”, rings with a pleasantly repeated arpeggio line, as Brock delivers a classically Isaac-Brock-inflected line: “Ice age, heat wave can’t complain/If the world’s at large, why should I remain?/Walked away to another plan/Gonna find another place/Maybe one I can stand.” Though he is obviously restless, there is a sense that change for the better is coming and has come, “as we all Float On” through this confusing, yet beautiful life. The next track, “Float On”, a distant variation of “The World at Large”, shares the same hopeful spirit, armed with chiming guitars and an upbeat melody.
Another noticeable shift is that there aren’t too many bars of music that lack Brock’s unmistakably original voice. Brock whispers, rasps, sings in gangs of himself, in rounds with himself, shouting through megaphones or voiceboxes, warbling, cracking his voice, doing Les Claypool impressions, and generally makes himself personally present in almost every corner of the album. Understandably then, very few instrumental solos have the time to vie for Brock’s constantly dropped aphorisms through rants and quiet lilts.
If possible, the new Modest Mouse perhaps sounds more rootsy, albeit “rootsy” interpreted into their own weird language. Quirky licks of the guitar sometimes are reminiscent of Asian music; sometimes the band could draw comparisons to some sort of post-modern bluegrass. On “Bury Me With It”, the band is supported by a traditionally instrumented band, the Rising Star Fife and Drum Band. On “The Devil’s Workday,” the Dirty Dozen Brass Band blares some wonderfully old-fashioned down-at-home jazz, as they are accompanied only by Brock literally acting the part of the devil with his banjo. Through his Tom Waits-ish gravelly voice, Brock tells mischievously devilish lies: “Well let’s take this potted plant to the woods and set it free/I’m gonna tell the owners just how nice that was of me/I could buy myself a reason/I could sell myself a job/I could hang myself for treason/For I am my own damn god.” Elsewhere, on “Dance Hall” Brock starts subdued, but works himself into an existential-angst-driven fervor, repeating the mantra “I’m gonna dance hall, dance hall every day” over and over, shouting other indecipherable lyrics over the shoe-tapping din.
Death, as I said, retains as prominent a place in this album as on “The Moon and Antarctica.” Playing a hick, Brock does a total freak out on the word “PLEASE bury me with it,” as he describes various objects of sentimental value he wants taken with him to the grave. In “The View,” a track made up of John Frusciante guitar lines, kiddie synths, having an overall feel of an off-kilter gameshow, Brock tells us, “Life it rents us/And yeah I hope it put plenty on you/Well I hope mine did too…As life gets longer, awful feels softer/And if it takes shit to make bliss, then I feel pretty blissfully.” During “Satin in a Coffin”, the whole band urgently asks us if we’re asleep or if we’re dead, later positing that “We are our own damn coffins.” Following this, on “Interlude” with Eric Judy at the pump organ, the band gives a harlequin version of their own funeral as a baby wawls and googles in the background.
Maybe the best two tracks, however, are saved until late in the album. “Blame It On the Tetons” is this record’s all-encompassing prosecution of the whole scene, falling into the tradition of that Pavement fave “Zurich is Stained.” This ballad/anthem, complete with its slow pace and brushes on the drums, definitely can be chalked up as one of Modest Mouse’s all-time best. The closer is perhaps the catchiest song of the whole bunch. Brock traipses his lines over a perfectly constructed melody; it is on this track that the Flaming Lips are supposed to be lurking in the background. Throughout all the madness of being in a big rock band, the late nights, the drugs, the wearying all-night parties, the excessive drinking, Brock can’t help feeling a little that “The Good Times Are Killing Me.”
What can I say? Modest Mouse has nailed this album as effectively as Brock successfully nails the global human dilemma. As people who are used to bad news, we should all find it good news that Modest Mouse has broke from the underground into the limelight.
