Of Modest Mice and & '90s Children

Modest Mouse is absolutely the first band to awaken my jam-dance: unencumbered catharsis extreme. 2006 on the NJ Transit to the city, we were rolling our 16 year-old faces off each with an earbud in, the entire discography up until their latest album Good News for People Who Love Bad News on my iPod set to shuffle. The train was stopped for an hour because a man had jumped in front of it. We compensated by raging our whole bodies up and down the slippery seats, elbows flying, heads thrashing as far as our shared earbuds would allow. "Teeth Like God's Shoe Shine" was so wild and heavy that when "She Ionizes and Atomizes" came on next, my thumb hovered over the next button, ready. Fast as a snap, Meg grabbed my hand in hers and gasped, "I love this song!" My heart nodded and body smiled as i sailed on the dreamy twang cascade.

"I hope we move soon," I commented, rolling my wrists and arms into waves forward. Meg's hand jumped from my hand to my thigh.

"WE HAVEN'T BEEN MOVING THIS ENTIRE TIME?!"

Obviously we sprinted and wormed our way through the blue-lit crowd just as Modest Mouse came onstage, immediately plunging into "The Ocean Breathes Salty." Through the show, my whole dance spark inside woke up thrilled and ready to light up with the music. "Bukowski" moved my snakey limbs in new twisty ways and "Paper Thin Walls" had me jumping hard enough to feel my skeleton reverberate off my ankles. I've only heard secondhand stories about a bad Modest Mouse show. They've had me dancing just as hard every time I've seen them. And after their latest album, this anticipatory hunger in my soul pocket has been ceaselessly squiggling to see them again this summer.

En route to the Colimbus Circle show, 2009. On the way to an "All Nite Diner" not to mention "Cowboy Dan"

I'll admit. When Ophelia hit me up with the early Internet release of the "Lamp Shades on Fire," track, I had high expectations of a dirty, out there Mousey wilderness, because she kept going on about how great it was and how she couldn't stop listening to it. But when she came over and we listened together, I shrugged. "It sounds like it could be on 'We Were Dead Before the Ship Even Sank,'" I said, following the uppity layers and buh-buh-duh-duh bridges between them. She went upstairs to pee and came back down with a partially melted moleskin notebook. 

"You left this on your fucking LAMP!" she said. "We're listening to that song again!" We did, and my opinion was the same. I didn't listen to it again until this girl at work asked if I had. When I reactively replayed the song in my head, I fondly craved the rugged frenetic  riffs that appeared and wanted to hear them again. Beyond that, I also enjoyed getting it stuck in my head as Amy continued streaming it from YouTube multiple times a shift. I gotta say, yes! It's Totallyyyy fucking Mousey.

There are some musicians who clearly use their instrument as an outlet for the soul, like this guitar riff is rolling directly out of a facet of its player. It's why no one can echo or come close to singing like Isaac Brock or Janis Joplin; its why Mousey riffs, tempos, and layers can only be described as Mousey,  and why the glurbdacular culmination of funk and foodling can only be described as Phishy. There is a distinct difference in musicians playing from their inner-selves compared to music that all sounds the same on the radio. So after jammin' out the cafe two days to  "Strangers to Ourselves," I feel guilty for my initial reaction that Isaac Brock was recycling a sound. Hell no, this album is Mousey as ever.

"Nobody really likes this song, but they just don't get it," says Amy, the first time she plays me "Pistol." "But I LOVE it," she says, bouncing on her combat booted ankles to the thwackiting of drums as she turned the tiny speaker-knob up with a cheesin' smile. Amy's 18. And she's geeking out about Mouse as I've been for oh-my-oldness, a year and a decade now.

And head bangin, feelin that low-to-the-ground, grimy subway-fog beat start to build with frisky piano, I stop stocking coffee cups, look up at Amy and say, "HELLLL YEAH!" She claps and jumps up and down, and even throws both arms into the air with a triumphant "YAY!", and we dip our heads in and out of the whacky abrasion of lyrics that make us laugh and the taser-arcadey spook-beats. We dig it.

Through the years; Modest Mouse has steadily been a prominent favorite; I love it all. They've got a new flare on the distortion layers, which riddle and rattle, pump and pulse, blorp and bang beneath the distinctively haunting guitar ring-around that it could only be Isaac. Again, hell yeah. Each album carries its own taste, vigor, environment, dream-world, one for every mood and mindset, yet all share that striking Mouse sound and play. Even though it's hard to fathom an album to pin my soul down harder than The Lonesome Crowded West does, Brock's musical vernacular has spanned so many portals and forms, all while channeling that unmistakable Mouse jam, that yeah, it's spanning generations and bringing us together in our own esoteric Mouse hole. It's dark, it's bright, it's wig-out weird and dancehall explosive. It combs your brainwaves and flogs your ears, flings your neck and knocks your knees, pulling your cerebrum and forcing you to know: WE HAVE DEFINITELY BEEN MOVING THIS ENTIRE TIME.