Review: Christian Stanger
Having been a fan for nearly this whole millennia, there is a specific kind of anxiety that comes with listening to a new Modest Mouse album for the first time. There are things you want, or need, as the case may be. You want it to be familiar but not the same. You want Isaac Brock to sound unhinged at times, introspective at others, but only in the right way. And it can’t be forced! But mostly you want the regular catharsis from the existential dread that has seeped into everything in our current age.
‘Picking Dragons’ Pockets’ works by taking simple ideas and stretching them out and the result is the closest they’ve come to the pop-magic of ‘Float On’ since the release of ‘Dashboard’ from We Were Dead Before The Ship Even Sank in 2007 – albeit with more disorientating lyrics like “we’ve been eating our young” and the more ominously poetic “idle hands around the devil’s throat”. The track itself is built almost entirely around a two-chord progression, that mutates into something slightly discordant and beautifully ragged, a noisy piece of indie rock that fits snugly in the Mouse discography and sets a restless tone early on.
Themes of dreams, sleep and altered states are everywhere on this record, but what’s striking is how many tracks feel dreamlike in their construction. “Life’s a Dream” drifts between atmospheres and textures, distant voices and reverb-soaked guitars, while “Dogbed In Heaven” spends an awful lot of time building an idea straight out of dustbowl American folk, before abandoning it without warning and veering to something else. Two unrelated ideas, unfinished ideas stitched together with the only cohesion being their disjointed lyrics that feel restless and spiralling. Somehow, it works and all it needs is the unhinged closing refrain with Isaac Brock talk-singing “just give it a skeleton and let it walk around”. This is what I came here for!
Throughout the album, songs don’t travel in straight lines. This is Modest Mouse. What did you expect? They meander and wander and surprise you where they end up. Elsewhere, ‘Absolutely Necessary Never’ is a world of its own, full of contradictions and uncertainty and ‘Impossible Somedays’ directly references sleep again between falling under layers of guitar that threaten to drown you as well.
‘Third Side of the Moon’ takes us back to the more beautiful and haunting moments of the band’s early era. Quiet and brooding with alterations of the line “well, I can’t remember if your eyes were green or blue or red” becoming more abstract as the unreliable memory of a loved one fades. Surely this song has some deeper meaning, dwelling on themes of blurred lines between sleep, death and memory.
Not every track sticks to rules of theme, however, as Gaz Coombes once said, “long live the strange”, and side two has plenty of that. ‘Song About Nothing’ is what its title promises: absurd, eccentric and strangely compelling. ‘Stoner Party’ follows with yet more short, sharp oddness, hiding out near the end (where a lot of these tracks tend to lurk on Modest Mouse records). These may seem slight next to the meatier moments, but it’s part of what we need from Modest Mouse. For each poetically perfect statement, there’s something happening up ahead to throw you off the trail.
And that’s really what you look for in a Modest Mouse record. You want it to sound like Modest Mouse, but you need it to happen without trying. You want the peculiarity, the observations, the dread, the moments of beauty, the nonsense and the hooks that get you singing for 20 years. An Eraser and a Maze delivers it all. The songs wander and mutate, and Isaac Brock reminds me again he is one of the great poets of this uncertain, confusing, and unrelentingly strange age.
An Eraser and a Maze out Friday 5 June via Glacial Pace Recordings / Virgin Music Group
