1. The Lonesome Crowded West (1997)

With a mid-album run of songs that has rarely been bettered on any indie rock album not named In The Aeroplane Over The Sea, The Lonesome Crowded West remains Modest Mouse’s defining statement. Ostensibly a concept album about the proliferation of strip malls and the paving of the west, the prescient and precocious album is the sound of minimalism writ large, performed by an orchestra of skull-capped skeletons who ride Greyhound buses and Amtrak trains for fun. Throughout the album, lyrical themes are often restated within musical structures, creating, accidentally or not, a rare sort of thematic harmony. Take, for example, the very long chorus of “Teeth Like God’s Shoeshine,” whose clinking, dolphin-song guitars demonstrate the “sparkling, shimmering and shining” of the lyrics. Similarly, choruses and bridges often take their time returning to verses; just as often they careen spaceward into solos and wide-open zones, as if to say “the songs are lonesome and crowded, too.” Though the term has become meaningless in a post-Bon Iver, post-Arcade Fire kinda world, The Lonesome Crowded West is Modest Mouse’s final indie rock record. It’s the last Modest Mouse album recorded mostly as a three-piece, the last time Brock would strain so much to sound like Daniel Johnston, the last time double-tracked vocals would occasionally wander endearingly off-key (see “Trailer Trash”). Despite the successes of future albums, Modest Mouse would never again brush against this type of fleeting humanity. From the epic “Trucker’s Atlas” (which features the immortal lyric “Every time you think you’re walking/ you’re just moving the ground”) to the death-rattling, ominous “Cowboy Dan,” The Lonesome Crowded West is the closest Modest Mouse ever got to perfect. Of course, the album would prove to represent as much a beginning as an ending. They may not have known it at the time, but for the band that always insistently claimed Issaquah, Washington, and not the neighboring hipster cities of Olympia or Seattle, as their place of origin, the world was about to get much, much bigger.