mangiotto's Full Review: Lonesome Crowded West by Modest Mouse
A wicked amalgamation of The Pixies, Jane’s Addiction, Archers of Loaf, and that Deliverance kid, Modest Mouse, an Issaquah-based quartet of suspected felons and all-around dangerous young guys, is a maddening and occasionally brilliant post-modernist noise group that would be jarring and unlistenable if not for its zealot’s order; stapling all the disparate parts down to a frighteningly organized board. It’s hillbilly philosophy (“I’m drowning upside down, my feet afloat like Christ’s” – ‘Styrofoam Boots’), set to a whirly-gig tornado sensibility – a churning cacophony of calliope hurdy gurdy – there you hear it, a fiddle, right? and then is that Frank Black? and then the bossa-nova and a wah-chucka-chucka punk guitar melody line followed close by a repetitive mantric bass musing. For their album The Moon and Antarctica, they credit the 13-page lunatic ravings of a madman calling himself “Ugly Casanova” as the foundation for their theme for that album – and after listening to The Lonesome Crowded West over the last few weeks, wondering if my mind were being subtly altered (the exact sensation one gets as a child whilst watching the Dr. Who BBC series, oddly enough), – I went out and got me a copy of The Moon and Antarctica to see if I could identify separate pathologies.
In other words, was Ugly Casanova in fact the muse for the band or did the schizoid chicken come before the cracked egg before the pretentious college janitors and fry chefs with an ax to grind?
The jury’s still out. What I do know is that Modest Mouse is very possibly the best independent band working today not because they’re melodic (and they are melodic sometimes), but because they are pretentious and cracked and angry; full to bursting on the milk-fed suburban teenage blues. They’re better, a little, than Neutral Milk Hotel because they’re more consistently challenging, and they can’t be compared to the furious genius of Bright Eyes because Bright Eyes isn’t a band (and is absolutely honest in his furious pretension, cracked or otherwise). Modest Mouse isn’t like very much that I’ve ever heard before when taken as a whole, but one song at a time, there aren’t many moments in it that won’t seem familiar to you in some way: The Pixies influence is strong and irrefutable, the voicework recalls some of Perry Farrell’s finer moments, and the seething rage reminded me of a few Stygian months in the long dark teatime of my own self-indulgent soul. When frontman Isaac Brock screams “This boat is obviously sinking” during a screeching (weaselly?), wailing riff showcasing his shaker guitars and Jeremiah Green’s sick drumming (“Shit Luck” off Lonesome Crowded West), I gave up all pretense of any restraint purportedly accompanying age and like a coyote in a peyote patch, ululated in sympathy until my throat was scratched raw. That’s when I decided that I didn’t care if I liked Modest Mouse - I decided that I liked Modest Mouse’s music. A lot.
The Lonesome Crowded West is that traveling black-top hokum carny. You probably didn’t want to go and once there you certainly don’t want to be on any of the rides and once on them, you’re not sure if you’re scared or having the time of your life. Songs that didn’t penetrate past the “??” the first time through, eventually lodge themselves into the cracks of your pleasure centers like molten honey (none of that processed stuff: straight off the comb, bee parts and all) and melted peanut butter and molasses.
But Modest Mouse appears to be more than just an assonant collection of over-educated assholes with a glib rebel message and a really loud amplifier – they appear to be on to something here. They’re neo-Graffin-ites at their core: marrying Bad Religion’s hyper-literate attack of suburban malaise to the Archer’s White Trash Heroes’s gift for arcane word candy and vein-testing speed. The combination creating something lyrically similar to what one suspects might happen if Gertrude Stein and Spalding Gray collaborated on a rewrite of the Benjy section of Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury. . . And then set the resplendent mess to an anvil-strike of willfully obscure musical audacity. That still doesn’t explain the soft acoustic beauty of “Bankrupt on Selling” and “Styrofoam Shoes” that ends Lonesome Crowded West, nor does it do much to nail down from whence the dead perfect alterna-bluegrass of “Jesus Was an Only Child” comes. Let’s not get too comfortable here and suggest that Modest Mouse is just a bunch of sour punks with tired middle fingers – that’s the easy answer. The Lonesome Crowded West is a tougher question than that.
The Lonesome Crowded West is also awe-inspiring music. It is angry and confused, lonesome and crowded, ebullient and sullen, quiet and ear-splitting, harried and calm. Something of Grant Wood in its exegesis of the American gothic, something of Edward Hopper in its well-lit desolation, something again of the southern gothic in its rotted out relational orbits. Or it is a system of deconstructionalist dyads, if you prefer, something illustrated with a mosaic grace in Eliot’s “The Hollow Men,” or it is a neo-Pixies expression of musical chops and moral shifting and just being too smart for their own good and too pissed off to be focused. Post-modern in its philosophy, nihilistic in its message, approaching raving genius in its execution, The Lonesome Crowded West is Modest Mouse being tight.
Despite its blatant and insouciant desire to confront its listener both intellectually and viscerally, it’s also the quartet’s most accessible piece (The Moon and Antarctica is equally brilliant in many ways, but too alien for simple enjoyment) and, perversely, the most patriotic bit of art since Paris, Texas and Nashville and The Road to Ensenada. Give it a listen if you like your music to invite you to arm wrestle on a filthy fold-out poker table, pock-marked with cigarette burns, set up in the back room of a smoke-filled trailer whose floors are slick with tobaccy juice that’s parked in the middle of a breathtaking saguaro plain. It’s music born of ennui and cunning, and it scared religion into me. I’ve seen the face of God, and He’s missing a couple of teeth.
Modest Mouse is corybantic and turbulent like the lonesome crowded west, and The Lonesome Crowded West is the place you should start if you’re ready to join the congregation. Tread lightly if you tread at all, and bring a lozenge and some nice lemon tea. You’re gonna’ need it.
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