(In the next month or two, I'll be doing several series-reviews of different music artists, revisiting their old albums to give context to their brilliant new ones. In some cases, like telling you about the Rheostatics' Night of the Shooting Stars as background for their new 2067, this will involve writing a new piece from scratch. In others, like telling of Amy X Neuburg's career before the towering achievement that is her new album Residue, I'll be re-singing praises I'd already sung pre-Epinions, edited to make them better reflect my experiences _now_.

In the case of Modest Mouse's 2004 release Good News for People who Love Bad News, which has here suffered a series of lukewarm 3-star and 4-star endorsements, my belief in its greatness turns partly on my pleasure in how lyricist Isaac Brock has matured and grown since their 2000 masterpiece the Moon and Antarctica. Therefore, I'm reproducing my old review, written by a 4-years-less-mature me, with no changes except for clarity.

Warning: the review, written in mid-November 2000, contains some political content. However, it does _not_ contain political argument, nor was it meant to. Isaac Brock writes, and Modest Mouse plays, emotionally; my review was about emotional reaction. And if memory serves, sleeping later helped a lot.)

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There is no necessary connection between the gifts of an artist and the same artist's good personal character. People should keep an artwork and its author separate; I know that. Picasso and Dali were, according to the research, destructive jackasses; Orwell was a neurotic, a snob, and a dubious reporter. Any number of literary fans have been careful to keep their hero-worship polite, and still been told by their heroes to sod off, or to show their tits. Rock music is a field made for precocious, undersocialized adolescents with precocious, undersocialized messages, often accompanied by perfectly real wizardry with a melody or a guitar solo. It would be silly to suppose that any random sheet-music illiterate with an intuitive sense for when to dip into the Phrygian scale would turn out to be fine and noble person.

I observe this obvious truth because, for me, it doesn't seem to work. I know rock stardom has attracted its fair share of junkies, wife-beaters, layabouts who cancel concerts on 3 seconds notice, and pathetic swaggering glory hounds. Many of them are incredibly gifted, but for whatever reason I don't _like_ the music of Lou Reed, or Courtney Love (well, except "Violet"), or Guns'n'Roses ("Paradise City", true), or Limp Bizkit. I don't find their arrogance sexy, for one thing, and maybe that invalidates for me a huge share of their appeal.

Johnny Rotten was a jerk, true, but in his prime he made this jerkness a magnificent form of public entertainment, and dead-on funny. Kurt Cobain made asinine personal choices, but he also went far out of his way to turn his success into publicity for his heroes (the Vaselines, the Meat Puppets, the Pixies, David Bowie, the Fastbacks, etc etc), which was incredibly sweet of him.

Bob Geldof, meanwhile, whose Boomtown Rats remain among my favorite bands ever on musical and lyrical grounds, dedicated three sleep-deprived years of his life to the most successful anti-famine campaign in world history. R.E.M. have devoted their fortune to preserving the independence and creative fertility of Athens, Georgia. Peter Garrett and Rob Hirdt of Midnight Oil are effective left-wing activists Down Under, which on one level is probably an of-course (I like singing along with the troublemakers I agree with) ... except I'd find the Oil's mid-80's music mesmerizing even if they were singing about methodological disputes in the archaeological use of carbon dating, or about keeping on loving you cuz it was all they knew how to do.

After all, U2's lyrics are cliches, despite which I consider Boy and Achtung Baby! to be masterpieces -- and Bono, taking the unusual care to be a _well-informed_ celebrity lobbyist for the cause of 3rd-world debt relief, just helped talk a Republican Senate into authorizing an amount of debt forgiveness that exceeds all the money ever spent on U2 albums. That's pretty wow, in my book. Tori Amos's lyrics are opaque, ambiguous internal monologues, but in real life she puts real work and money into security for battered women.

All this isn't even considering the Dar Williamses and Martin Tiellis and Ian Andersons and Cindy Lee Berryhills and Alanis Morissettes of my collection who simply by all reports are sweet, good-hearted souls. I don't know what level of this is coincidence, and what level is some subconscious intuition on my part dragging me in the direction of people I won't be embarrassed to care about. Perhaps there's some third level, in which some of the qualities that distinguish my taste in songs (craftsmanship and melody-over-rhythm preference and wordplay and soundplay and attention deficit disorder) themselves tend to be traits of friendly geeks who don't Choose Drugs; perhaps not. Whatever, so far it works remarkably well.

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And then, of course, comes the day when I find myself walking around town singing, a la Modest Mouse's Isaac Brock, "Well it took a lot of work to be the asss I am/ and I'm pretty damn sure that anyone can/ equally easily fuuck you over". Or a gleeful "I'm gonna punch you in the face, I'm gonna hit you in the glasses".

Modest Mouse's the Moon and Antarctica is clearly an extraordinary hour of music, in my opinion and that of critics generally; probably my choice as Art-Rock Album of the Year, as long as we don't question too hard what I mean by that. The varied indie-guitar tones, chopping and keening and bending, resemble early Flaming Lips or Sparklehorse or Summer Hymns, but more precise, usually darker, sometimes nastier. Brock's singing – generally high and drawled – mutates to take on the dry narration of Frank Black; the helium gruffness of an enraged Wayne Coyne with a throat cold; the wavery apologetics of a Tulsa adolescent caught playing hooky; the low threatening sultriness of Barry Andrews; the knowing weariness of a male Lisa Germano; the narrative forthrightness of a 7th-grade Earth Science filmstrip on why we're all going to be killed by a meteorite; and even, several times, an awkward preacher hopefulness.

The rhythm section paces the songs in expert concept-album flow, expansive langour and clipped propulsion keeping each other in check. Tyler Riley's cello and violin parts don't pretend to be a full string section, but they add grace to help "the Cold Part", "the Stars are Projectors", and "Life Like Weeds" justify their 5-to-9-minute lengths. Ben Blankenship's occasional organ notes are long, pretty, and generally brought in to smooth transitions between songs or segments. "Gravity Rides Everything" brings jangly lead guitar to the front of an arrangement where all the other sounds are backwards. The "Stars are Projectors"/ "Wild Pack of Family Dogs" pairing merges ragged indie-pop, electronica (if electronica the compositional style can be acoustic), soundtrack orchestration, and backporch folk, seamlessly. The attention to creative detail is remarkable. No wonder I'd sing along.

Thing is, I like Brock's lyrics, though I doubt I'd like him (heck, I don't think he likes him). Antarctica is a big-issues record, spiritual and questioning – the "Strawberry Fields"-y refrain "Gotta see, gotta know right now" is the second chorus of the record. This isn't Jethro Tull's Aqualung, making fun of the concept of God; this record wants an answer for creation, and its disgust is its doubt that there exists a _likeable_ answer.

"Everyone's life ends, but no one ever completes it" is a complaint that 40 years of increasing back pains and modified goals tend to remove for most people. But Isaac, young, can deduce that the pragmatic concessions to reality are just whitewashes, not cures. "I want to live in a city with no friends or family" was Isaac's real-life strategy before writing this album, and we could see it as a quest to save himself from those very surrenders.

"I'm gonna hit you in the glasses" is a nihilist's rhyme for "We're heading down the road to tiny cities made of ashes", all delivered in cocky, funky death disco; but as the song's panicked, processed, echoed yelps move closer to Die Warzau, the emphasis shifts to a plaintive "Does anybody know a way that a body can get away?". "Wild Pack of Family Dogs" is submissive and good-humoredly numb, a surreal shrug at watching his family and himself being eaten while the killers ascend to heaven for rewards. Even the tender love song belongs, as its promise of "In this life like weeds, you're the dirt I breathe" – I said "tender", not "stolen from Barry White" – lasts only "until there's nothing left to breathe, until there's nothing left to speak". No wonder he concludes that "It takes a long time but God dies too/ but not before He sticks it to you".

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I, of course, am not metaphysically inclined. I'm political; I'd rather solve problems, not make taxonomies of them. Where this record most reflects _my_ bad moods is in its stray pragramtisms. "The universe is shaped exactly like the earth/ if you go straight long enough, you'll end up where you were"; yeah, that's the distressing part. "You've got the harder part, you've got the softer heart"; yes, exactly.

"If you could have anything you want, I bet you'd be disappointed", he asserts, and yes, of course; just as if your worst fear happened to you, you'd probably find it wasn't _that_ bad. But while people who become quadriplegic don't, in practice, end up much less happy than people who win the lottery, I'd still rather see more people get the wealth, less get the crippling ailment, and all of them get better training for how to enjoy good fortune. I don't want to get away from the tiny cities made of ashes, I want to save the cities in the first place. But. The more futile this looks, the more Modest Mouse endear themselves to me.

The recent 2000 elections took more out of me than I intended to let them. Or maybe not: I _am_ testing the theory that, by moving my work shift 2.5 hours later (wake-up at 9:00 a.m., instead of 6:30), I will instantly resume my optimistic view of humanity. But that'd be a less substantive essay.

Sleepy analyses or not, I found myself resenting the Republicans for fixing an undecided Florida vote (preventing recounts to allow for how machines in poor = Democratic districts seem to lose far more ballots) and for calling Gore a "thief" for trying to recount an election he had in fact won by around 800,000 votes. I resented the right-wing Democrats for talking about bipartisan co-operation at exactly the moment that Bushmen were being most vituperative, like Marshall Petain seeking common ground with Hitler. I resented the left-wing Democrats who voted Gore over Nader for "strategic" reasons, then treated the election as proof of their righteousness even as we saw complete proof via recounts and machinations that, _even in an election with a real margin of one vote_, an individual vote could never decide an election.

I resented the unions who worked hard for Gore, an open shill for a "global labor market" that treats 85-cent-a-day Pakistani wages as the benevolent workings of a "free" market. I got sick of being told that Nader had cost Gore a victory, when the _only_ times Gore ever gained in the polls were when Nader scared him into campaigning on diluted versions of Nader's issues. Take Nader out of the race, and I think Bush would've won by eight points; give Nader real union support, and I think the entire campaign would've been transformed for the better.

I resented George Bush for being a mean-spirited semi-literate with a long history of taking millions of dollars from family friends and squandering it (but then slashing welfare), of doing drugs youthfully (but then imprisoning youthful drug users), of taking credit for laws he'd opposed (then calling Gore a liar). And I _really_ resented the 74% of Americans who didn't vote for _any_ of his opponents. I resented how most people would think being resentful over silly ol' politics is a waste of time, as if they were going to step forward and save my family's finances if, in the next few weeks before my privately purchased medical insurance kicks in, I suffer a few hundred thousands worth of uninsured injury.

And then, when Nader did lose big, proving that the attempt to work outside the Democratic Party was basically doomed, Nader "declared war" on the Democrats, and started talking about unseating even liberal Democrats like Paul Wellstone and Russ Feingold – which means even he's become a nutcase who must be stopped. Where is the percentage in being nice? Where is the percentage in wincing the way I do when "What People are Made of", the distorted Wrens-like pounding that ends Antarctica, closes the album on its one really repulsive sentiment: "Humans ain't nothing but water and shiit"?

But of course, having the soft heart isn't about playing percentages. There are many people I love: not "many" as a fraction of six billion, but enough to give immense value to me. I love many things that humans have constructed; with effort and luck, I can help more people find more things to love. How long these people and things will survive is a question, more of a question now than before the election, but that just means we'd better enjoy faster. Even Isaac Brock urges "It's hard to remember that our lives are such a short time/ it's hard to remember to live before you die".

A bitter, broken idealist is better for the world than a confident ruthless bastard, and perhaps that lets the Moon and Antarctica be one of the things I love: from the swiped Renaissance-metal Jethro Tull hook and claustrophobic array of voices on "a Different City", to how the guitar strings on "Lives" vibrate like arrows shot into hollow containers, to how Brock's voice rises disembodied above "the Cold Part"'s drift like Cliff Burton's deathwish on Metallica's "To Live Is To Die". But however fond I've become, a happy idealist is still better. To be happy _and_ idealistic, of course, requires a very selective view of the world. Let's hang out and select sometime.

Recommended: Yes