More than at any point since the mainstream coronation of rock and roll, fans are increasingly sympathetic to selling out, if not outright supportive of musicians taking shelter within whatever remaining revenue streams have not dried up in the streaming era. These are dire economic times, and the purity of forgoing licensing deals was easier to uphold for bands who could still mint a salary hawking rings of polycarbonate and acrylic plastic. Value systems have become so far warped by need that we’ve come to project an aura of ironic protest to bands who succeed in making a living. Yes! Bleed money from the corporate veins! Slay the capitalist beasts from within!
Spending is self care. Sales are survival. The revolution is shaped exactly like the Earth; if you go straight long enough you’ll end up where you were.
Capital-captive art is not the way the system should work. But it is often the way things are, and the way things are is something Isaac Brock had proven himself a unique expert in making sense of. On Modest Mouse’s ’90s albums, the lead singer’s sandpapery bark and yuppie-puncturing poetry – perfectly canvassed by Jeremiah Green’s terse drums and Eric Judy’s porous basslines – made him the premiere pessimist in a post-Cobain Pacific Northwest. During the boom of the late ’90s, those dissatisfied by the societal “progress” of cheap goods enabled by cheaper labor could take heart in Brock talking shit about a pretty sunset, promising “you will come down soon too.”
Per usual, Brock was ahead of the times, but his band of shoe-stringers from Issaquah, Washington was still very much beholden to the pressures of their time. Facing backlash from indie rock evangelicals when he allowed Nissan to sell minivans using his single “Gravity Rides Everything,” he held firm with the justification: “People who don’t have to make their living playing music can bitch about my principles while they spend their parents’ money or wash dishes for some asshole.” The underground, at least online, was largely made up of those accused – people who could afford to deny participation in the great economic survival pit, even if they too would love to acquire a monetizable following as a result of spouting holier-than-thou principles.
Modest Mouse’s were trying to build a body of work more sustainable than a self-flagellating revolution. They began humbly as a band of high schoolers, who took in the anxious grooves of the Talking Heads and the Pixies and channeled them through the lacerated melodies of their regional predecessors like Built To Spill and Lync. The result stood apart from their contemporaries while still nodding towards established traditions, allowing space for Brock to purge demons regarding his challenges with substance abuse and cultural disillusionment. That this process could help him find some steady financial footing should be celebrated as the great American songwriter’s dream – your melodic musings resonating enough to support you continuing to conjure them.
All the same, the “Gravity Rides Everything” controversy has long been eclipsed in the band’s history as “the” sellout moment. That song’s parent album, 2000’s The Moon And Antarctica, was immediately compared to Radiohead’s OK Computer upon release, heralded as a modern existential masterpiece that many would tell you they “don’t make ’em like anymore.” It was with their next album that the critique of oversaturation for the post-grunge Seattle-satellite warriors started to gather more evidence: Grammy nominations, SNL performances, platinum sales. The first time many of my generation heard “Float On” was while pushing plastic buttons in time to the zippy central riff on Guitar Hero: World Tour.
By that point in 2008, Modest Mouse – still as arty and unwieldy on their albums as they were in the previous decade – were simultaneously a radio band, producing additional hit singles in “The Ocean Breathes Salty,” “Dashboard,” and “Missed The Boat.” This dichotomy flummoxed fans, branding their fourth album Good News For People Who Love Bad News as the transitional record of the band’s discography. For some it would be a bridge too far, while others recognized it as a tunnel between their past and present that validates the underlying theses of both approaches.
The distance between Modest Mouse’s scrappier beginnings – bouncing sawtoothed lo-fi gems on K Records, Sub Pop, and Up Records – and their more melodic and expansive albums for Epic is shorter than most give the band credit. Good News is fueled by many of the same preoccupations as their first two albums, The Lonesome Crowded West and This Is A Long Drive With Nothing To Think About. Largely what had changed was the scale of the stage, with Brock’s purview stretching from the hyperlocal of inert parking lots and endless interstates towards the more philosophically universal. And like with The Moon & Antarctica, Brock had started to allow some type of moral to emerge from his sordid stories of contemporary isolation and ennui. The plane was definitely crashing, but Brock’s mind moved on to the floatation devices under his seat. The warmer tones, more pillowy percussion, and twinkling guitars helped deliver those silver linings like a gentle tide nudging a sinking swimmer back to the surface.
And yet the stink of pessimism is unmistakable through the bulk of the tracks on Good News, some of which felt more dire and ugly than anything Brock had delivered before. The unhinged narrator of “This Devil’s Workday,” running ahead of the bombastic horn stabs of the Dirty Dozen Brass Band, makes “Cowboy Dan” look like an upstanding citizen. On “One Chance” – in which returning guitarist Dann Gallucci shows off some of the delicate origami fretwork that made him a key guest player for Lonesome Crowded – Brock formally puts to use the long-floating lyric, “I’m just a box in a cage,” desperately bemoaning the feeling of being in confinement when you don’t have anything left to give anyway.
Brock’s conclusions were indeed welcome for those who like bad news, and have aged to be increasingly prescient. We can’t drink the water anymore, the air is toxic, the earth is our coffin, all that’s left is to bury us with it. And if we wasted life, why wouldn’t we waste the afterlife too? Brock was bemoaning the degradation of the neighborhoods well before Arcade Fire; he was raising climate awareness before Greta Thunberg had been born, let alone guested on an album by the 1975. But on Good News, he can’t find a way out of this mess we’ve made that does not involve abandoning it all; on manic plea after manic plea, his arguments rarely land somewhere without death at the center.
But among all the pain that permeates these 14 songs (plus an intro and interlude), Modest Mouse delivered some of the most beautiful moments of their catalog. Take crown jewel “The World At Large,” which sets a far-reaching tome about regret and loneliness to a sublime pop arrangement of vocalizations (which would later make a return on the 2015 single “Lampshades On Fire”) and mellotron strings. “I like songs about drifters, books about the same,” the still twentysomething Brock shares, a reflection of why listeners themselves were drawn to his abstractions on rootlessness. He thoughtfully captured the aches of life’s daily rituals in the doomed imagery of lines like “the moths beat themselves to death against the lights” and “my thoughts were so loud I couldn’t hear my mouth.”
These knotty compositions and dead-end monologues did not come easy. The group spent six almost entirely unproductive months at a rental in Portland, sessions which saw Green quit over the course of inter-band arguments and personal nervous breakdowns (Green returned to his seat behind the kit soon after the album was released, where he would remain until passing away in December 2022). Needing fresh inspiration, the band decamped across the country to Oxford, Mississippi, recording with then-stranger Dennis Harding, who was most recently working with a clientele of more jangly roots-rockers like Counting Crows and Jars Of Clay.
This time things cohered, pushing Modest Mouse into lusher territory. Gallucci’s newly harmonic guitar parts added an orchestral heft, and Green replacement Benjamin Weikel gamely pushed and pulled punches over the album’s ever-shifting tides. Further accouterments of accordion, percussion, and backup vocals were offered from friends in the Flaming Lips, the Rising Star Fife And Drum Band, and Herring himself. The communal reverie of the guest list inspired new tones and temperaments, pushing more of Brock out of himself than ever before.
On prior Modest Mouse albums, Brock continuously alluded to a desire for sedation, whether by “traveling, swallowing Dramamine” or drinking away the part of the day he cannot sleep away. This time around, Brock’s indignation to the way society is letting the world fall apart inspired him to write madcap dirges, beleaguered by animosity towards collective apathy. Rollicking banjos, plucky upright bass, and seasick pump organ burst into the red, as Brock howls in riotous fervor.
After screeds like “Bury Me With It” and “This Devil’s Workday,” the singles “Ocean Breathes Salty” and “Float On” ripple like salves from a descent into dire straits. They are the rope Brock used to pull himself to shore where the rest of the album threatens to hang himself. Those tracks also served as Trojan horses, bringing unsuspecting listeners into Brock’s subsequent testing of their faith. Even if their singles could sell minivans, you wouldn’t necessarily want to play their albums for the family on the way to soccer practice.
A little over halfway through Good News, Brock betrays the resilient message of “Float On”, reasoning on “The View” that “If life’s not beautiful without the pain/ Well, I’d just rather never-ever even see beauty again.” The admission flips the prior sentiment into satire, a misdirection Modest Mouse alluded to with the “Float On” video, in which a flock of domesticated sheep are inadvertently carried to slaughter. Brock later admitted that the song came out of an exercise in trying to write away from all the negativity in the news and his personal life, not necessarily because of a sudden revelation in his outlook.
But the irony is that the irony didn’t take. “Float On” quickly became one of the all-time great feel-better songs, with countless testimonies from fans who used the song to move forward from a dark headspace. And in 2004, maybe Brock needed to hear his own message more than anyone. In the years prior, he had gotten his jaw broken by a group of kids in Chicago, was arrested and temporarily jailed for a previous DUI while on tour with his side project Ugly Casanova, and was developing a hit-or-miss live reputation due to his drunken appearances on stage. All of this, alongside the criticism he faced when he finally tried to make a living on his art, gave Brock plenty of backing to make the claim that the world was becoming more and more like the surface misanthropy of Charles Bukowski’s writings.
The potency of “Float On” comes from this sense that the narrator genuinely sounds like he has something he needs to shake off, an authenticity that other sunshine pop tracks of the era lacked. This is why the song has been able to lend its power over the last two decades to a parade of media, from One Tree Hill and The O.C. to Hit & Run and John Tucker Must Die (the latter in cover form by Ben Lee). As the band’s optimism struck a chord with audiences, their future took unpredictable new shapes. Modest Mouse suddenly became an ensemble that could court former Smiths guitarist Johnny Marr into their orbit, hit the top of the album charts, and financially support Brock’s children, his first of which was born in 2002 and went on to inspire his softened perspective on the most recent Modest Mouse album The Golden Casket. The band got writing credits when Lupe Fiasco’s top-10 hit “The Show Goes On” incorporated elements of “Float On,” earning them royalties likely worth more than many of their own singles combined.
Having taken flack for his earlier success, Brock got his revenge by doubling down. For a home-schooled child who grew up in wayward scarcity, who went on to name his band after a Virginia Wolfe depiction of the working class, whose second album was essentially a protest against contemporary urban life – this probably all seemed like a hilarious cosmic joke.
And yet there was no punchline to Modest Mouse’s skyrocketing profile. The band has remained idiosyncratic long after several of their peers would sand down their edges following a crossover hit. Brock is still releasing lead singles lambasting human-led environmental destruction and album cuts that double as modernity-wary conspiracy theories, rewarding close listening with their singular brand of freak-folk. Rather than a transitional record, Good News can alternatively be seen as the most all-encompassing record of the band’s career. It is Modest Mouse at their most: uncompromising and inimitable, incapable of being contained within our expectations for not only this band, but for any navigating the peculiarities of indie rock exceptionalism.
