Modest Mouse: The Lonesome Crowded West (Up Records)
Reviewed as part of Addison Godel's Desert Island Collection
In Isaac Brock's mind, the
world is falling apart. Displaced cowboys attempt to shoot God out of the sky,
parents hide their children from wild dogs, and buildings are "totally burning
down." What makes this album so unique is the way in which this grim world is
evoked - Modest Mouse's lyrical and musical pallettes are surprisingly varied, offering a
great deal of listening enjoyment even before one begins to probe into the exact nature of
Brock's Hell.
We are asked to observe the painful state of affairs from several angles. Some characters are on the brink, the crisis immediate. "This plane is definitely crashing!" screams Brock on "Shit Luck," the album's loudest and fastest moment. "And my heart is slowly drying up!" For others, things have long since fallen apart. "Cowboy Dan" introduces us to a "major player in the cowboy scene" (could there be a more hollow title?). "I didn't move to the city, the city moved to me," cries this washed-up, violent alcoholic. Futility is in the air, and the people of Brock's world are drowning in it.
Though the onset of enomie is recognized, it cannot be resisted, and from it grow indirect, subtly tension-building ballads as well as fearsome, jangly, off-kilter rockers, both of which abound with imagery of the dead and the dying. "Heart Cooks Brain" presents almost-pretty scenes of inevitability: "I push things out through my mouth but get refilled through my ears [...] In this place that I call home, my brain's a cliff and my heart's the bitter buffalo." The recurring images often relate to travel, as Brock's characters look for some kind of escape from their own spiritual decay: "I'm going to Colorado, to unload my head." But it's no use, and no comfort can be found, even when one of the characters reaches Heaven - as a figure, possibly the Almighty himself, explains: "God takes care of himself, and you of you." These people have absolutely nothing to hold on to.
This is, indeed, an album from the Lonesome Crowded West - that self-strangling expanse of America that is no longer wilderness but not quite high civilization. But the criticism of society's decay is explicit in only one song, the hypnotic and propulsive "Convenient Parking":
Soon a chain reaction started in the parking lot, waiting to bleed on to the big
streets
That bleed out onto the highways, and off to other cities
Built to store and sell these rocks
Aren't you feeling real dirty, sitting in the parking lot...
I think it is here that Brock reveals the source of all this venom, the origin of the overwhelming sense of decay. Without reading too much into the lyrics, one may observe that millions of Americans live in sprawling, mindless suburbs that offer up emptiness without seclusion. In a world that presents, physically, no chance at a lone stroll in the wilderness or a shared walk down a city street, is it any wonder that some must go mad, or at least become profoundly, terrifyingly sad?