The feeling of being stuck in a small town inflates to cosmological proportions. Home-schooled in religious hippie communes, Brock was primed for this visionary vocation. His lyrics are marked by a war between militant atheism and kind of crypto-Christian mysticism, a tension that twists his perspective into strange shapes. On these records, the pavement is steadily encroaching on the wild in ways that feel spiritually symbolic.
Brock wants to wrench apart ground and sky, prefabricated towns and consumer culture, to find an exit hatch into some deeper, more meaningful state of being which, as he suspects on "Exit Does Not Exist", is a fantasy. Modest Mouse never captured their particular rural paranoia better than on Lonesome 's "Cowboy Dan", a minor key dirge that takes us to a jet-black desert rustling below the occasional shooting star.
It's a folkloric tale of a cowboy who tries to shoot down God as revenge for mortality, with eerie calls and groans floating out of a vast, breathing darkness. It's all about inverted insides and outsides: huge landscapes that feel like small cages, civilizations that breed a savage misanthropy, disbelief that feels like religion. The record also refines some new looks that would soon be developed, such as the scratchy rural funk jam of "Jesus Christ Was an Only Child" and tender, ringing ballads such as "Heart Cooks Brain" and the gentle confessional "Trailer Trash".
With Moon , Modest Mouse caught a new wave of spacey psych-pop alongside the likes of The Flaming Lips, and it let them out on a foreign shore: mainstream success. To me, that was the last real Modest Mouse album—and even it was on the verge—as the personalities that made the group unique got diluted by new personnel, i. We Were Dead Before the Ship Even Sank was the band's first number one album, but it felt like an ending, and only an EP of leftovers from the last two albums has emerged since.
Lonesome came out right on the hinge between indie rock's regional phase and its global one, in , the year I got my first email address, and I still have the original LP I bought around then. It did not. Ansari is correct that no one fakes ejaculation on stage at a Modest Mouse concert. The near-capacity, sweaty, very white crowd of 4, ranged from high schoolers to graying alterna-dads, with most fans hovering in their late's.
Save for a few teenage girls in tie-dye skirts and the occasional dude with blonde dreadlocks, the crowd was flamboyantly plain. The men wore wire-rimmed glasses and thrift shop t-shirts; the women stuck to loose jeans and Chuck Taylors—that nearly sexless, aggressive underdressing GenX suburbanites use to express apathy, anti-materialism or both. The show was a technical disaster, with murky sound and endless glitches. Even before the first note, the band stood on stage twiddling their thumbs for a full minute while a sound guy tried to get a microphone working.
Formed as a trio in by Brock, bassist Eric Judy , and drummer Jeremiah Green , groomed by indie kingmaker Calvin Johnson , Modest Mouse cut a self-titled debut in , released two full-length albums in , and two more in The tour reflects the mature Mouse sound. The mix was crowded, with two drummers, a keyboardist, and a small horn section in addition to the requisite guitars and Brock's banjo.
Plagued by the aforementioned muddy sound, the band spent most of the night trying get in sync. When they did, though, as during " Whale Song ," it was stunning. A group of good musicians, led by a gifted but bored auteur, suddenly gelled into a passionate, explosive, world-class rock and roll band.
Electronic Folk International. Jazz Latin New Age. Aggressive Bittersweet Druggy. Energetic Happy Hypnotic. Romantic Sad Sentimental. Sexy Trippy All Moods. Drinking Hanging Out In Love. Introspection Late Night Partying. Rainy Day Relaxation Road Trip. Romantic Evening Sex All Themes. Articles Features Interviews Lists. By , the shine of grunge was wearing off and a new crop of bands was taking music in a more emotionally honest direction. Whether or not their members realised it, they were building the foundation for what would come to be labeled as emo.
Modest Mouse would likely not be considered an emo band by music aficionados. For most people, the band perfectly embodies peak mid-aughts indie rock crossover, complete with cameos on The O.
In , the line between indie and emo was a nebulous one. Modest Mouse formed in in the Seattle suburb of Issaquah, Washington.
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