Modest Mouse has a certain aesthetic, and I'm not sure if it's an aesthetic I share. These guys clearly take what they do seriously, try to write new and different hooks, intelligent and decipherable lyrics, and labor (as you must labor) to keep it loose. But something about this record just screams "2004" to me, as though that were a time long ago that I've walled off.
I was certainly living differently then: unmarried, different part of the state, different car that I was driving to New York on a monthly basis to see my girlfriend. I ate up a lot of miles in that year, and GNFPWLBN still feels like the soundtrack to those road trips. So maybe that's it.
But then again, maybe not.
In one sense, this is exactly the kind of CD that made people stop buying CD's in the last decade: the kind where the massive hit single sounds nothing like the rest of the album. Maybe that's why this album only hit the Billboard 200 for a week, while follow-up We Were Dead Before the Ship Even Sank stayed for 25 weeks and hit #1. But then maybe this album just paved the way for the follow-up's success. Lots of people lose money trying to figure out what music the public will buy.
This was MM's second album on Epic, and there's a powerful tension evident throughout; a desire to knock it out of the park and at the same time to not sell out and go arena. So they gussy up certain tracks, like "Please Bury Me With It," with an almost orchestral structure, while making others, like "Dance Hall," idiot-simple, yet filled with a miserable rage.
For my money, the better parts of this album are when they cut the shit and just let the song be. "Bukowski" was probably my favorite back in 2004, and it still holds up, even if Magnet thinks it's overrated (apparently because calling Bukowski, who worked really hard at being an asshole, an asshole is shitty because he's dead, and can't be an asshole back. Fucking hipsters), because it just sits down and plays the damn blues already. "The Devil's Workday" and "The View" likewise find the right balance between sharp hooks and expansive songcraft.
But other songs, like crit-fave "Ocean Breathes Salty" don't need to be that complex to get their point across. Stuffing an abrupt alt-tempo bridge/breakdown doesn't make the song bigger, just longer. And adding baby-babble to an interlude horn jam just reeks of false whimsy, especially as a lead-in to "Blame it on the Tetons."
Of course, if MM pretended that they weren't the glum cowboys of the indie scene, they'd be liars, which spells death to their preening audience. So I don't really know if I've got any answers. All I know is that by the time we get to "Black Cadillac" the attempt to resurrect "Float On"'s lightning rather fails to strike a spark. After which, the lack of good times kills.
But for all that, some of this stuff really works.
Grade: L
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