modest mouse by collin david

A Week With Modest Mouse's "We Were Dead Before The Ship Even Sank": Day 3

9 April 2007
tell your friends... tell your friends...

Words by Gabe Durhma // Illustration by Collin David

Listen. They’re like the Beatles, the way they devour their contemporaries. Maybe we’ll look back and credit Modest Mouse as the inventors of sounds they didn’t come up with only because they do it better than everyone else. “We’ve Got Everything,” and “The View” have devoured Franz Ferdinand. “Dashboard” is a huge smack to all the indie dance-rock bands that wish they could write guitar hooks as interesting as Johnny Marr and Isaac Brock. The bass line on “Education” schools the Killers. In a way, they’ve devoured the Shins too — Wincing the Night Away is evidence that the Shins would like to be able to experiment with as much success as Modest Mouse.

That said, James Mercer is a wonderful contributor. He plays the spoonful of sugar that makes “Florida” and “We’ve Got Everything” go down smooth, and he helps Brock create something wholly original and downright cheery with “Missed the Boat”. Mercer creates a perfect façade for a song about putting on a good face and distracting yourself as your life passes by. “And we carried it all so well,” Brock and Mercer sing, “As if we got a new position/And I laugh all the way to hell/I say yes this is a fine promotion”. Here we discover the distinction between floating on and laughing all the way to hell: The latter is against pretending to be happy when you aren’t, the former is in favor of salvaging things that make you happy.

For some of us, Modest Mouse’s music is one those things worth dragging ashore. These little moments — the “very well then” at the end of “Education,” the sudden cut-out on the synth solo on “People as Places as People,” the sincere “I’m very sorry” in “Little Motel,” the dramatic turning point in the middle of “Fly Trapped in a Jar” right when you begin to wonder, “Is this song going somewhere or is it another ‘Dance Hall’?” the pubescent guitar crack towards the beginning of “Invisible” — they add up to a reasonable explanation of why Modest Mouse is on top right now.

To put it in another way, lets oversimplify rock music for a moment: We’ve got these two camps, each exciting, each with limitations: The back-to-rock, pick-your-favorite-decade-to-emulate bands (Killers, Strokes, White Stripes, Franz Ferdinand) and the indie do-it-yourself, look-for-new-sound, voice-doesn’t-have-to-sound-like-American Idol bands (goes back to Pixies, Neutral Milk Hotel, Flaming Lips, Built to Spill. Newer incarnations of this movement are Daytrotter’s bread and butter.) I’d argue that the breakout success of bands like Arcade Fire, Death Cab, Modest Mouse and the Shins is their double threat — their ability to combine tradition and innovation, cacophony and melody. These bands cast a huge shadow over the indie and back-to-rock worlds, but it’s a wonder to see even a few of these bands find deserved success. Justice is what it is.

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i don’t know about the whole beatles thing, but it’s a good point how modest mouse does devour all that’s around them,
but the new album devours everything and then puts all those sounds in ONE song.

nicky b | 10 April 2007
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getting a bit carried away… eduction bass line nice, but doesn’t really school anyone

schlongvid | 23 April 2007
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Yeah schlong, that’s valid. I think Day 3 was at the height of my love for the album and the review starts to calm down after that. These are the excesses that get cut from traditional reviews but make this format interesting. It invites self-contradiction.

Gabe | 23 April 2007

commenting closed for this article



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