Damn this album is getting a lot of press....
article link April 11, 2004
The Mouse Still Roars
By KELEFA SANNEH
The New York Times
ots of the best indie-rock bands aren't really bands at all. They're alter egos or solo acts or traveling support systems for singer-songwriters. Cat Power is another name for Chan Marshall, Destroyer consists solely of Daniel Bejar; Dolorean is Al James and friends, the Decemberists are Colin Meloy and friends. And on a beautiful new album called "Bonnie `Prince' Billy Sings Greatest Palace Music," Will Oldham lets his alter ego, Bonnie "Prince" Billy, interpret the work of his one-man-band, Palace Music.
In a subculture ruled by armies of one, the veteran indie-rock act Modest Mouse seems more than a little out of place: it's a band in name and in fact. The group's leader, Isaac Brock, flirted with autonomy in 2002, when he released an uneven solo CD credited to Ugly Casanova. But now comes "Good News for People Who Love Bad News" (Sony), which proves this band has outlasted its era; "Good News" is the best Modest Mouse album yet.
Modest Mouse was formed in Issaquah, Wash., outside Seattle, and the band prospered during the dark ages after Nirvana and before the Strokes, when underground rock went back underground. The group's 1997 album, "The Lonesome Crowded West," was a knotty, exhilarating collection designed to ward off casual listeners and reward patient ones. Somehow, the album earned the band a major-label contract, but if the executives thought they had signed a great band that would conquer the charts, they were only half right.
It's been four years since the last Modest Mouse album and it seems the members have taken up an unlikely hobby: they've been listening to the Talking Heads. The album's lead single, "Float On," is the greatest song David Byrne never yelped. Mr. Brock delivers the lyrics in frantic little bursts ("I. Backed. My. Car. In. To. A. Cop car. The other. Day/ Well he just drove off, sometimes life's O.K."), as if trying in vain to resist the fierce undertow of the backbeat.
This group has always excelled at density, but "Good News" is a marvel of lightness. Eric Judy's chewy bass lines, which often provide the melody, nudge the songs ever upward and outward, and Dann Gallucci adds glimmering atomized guitar chords. "One Chance," one of the album's last songs, starts with a gentle, tangled guitar riff, which builds and then unexpectedly disappears, leaving only a meandering bass line to accompany Mr. Brock as he sighs the lyrics.
Bands with only one voting member often find a specialty and stick to it: if the leader excels at writing pretty, sorrowful songs, then that's all you'll hear. Modest Mouse, on the other hand, gallops through backwoods stomps and new-wave ballads and one snappish dance-punk track. At the same time, the album is full of echoing phrases ("The days get longer" in one song, "Life gets longer" in another; "good news" morphs into "good times" and "good luck") that make each song sound like part of the same cracked story.
In "Bury Me With It," Mr. Brock slips into character as a man whose time has passed, barking, "Well, the suit got tight and it split at the seams/ But I kept it out of habit and I kept it real clean/ But if it's getting faded, if it's running out of thread / Could you do this for me my friend?/ And please just please! / Bury me with it." Time and trends have conspired to turn him into the old-fashioned crank he has always pretended to be â?? he seems happy to celebrate his own obsolescence, and happier still that he doesn't have to do it alone.
