Modest Mouse: No One's First and You're Next

Modest Mouse’s fourth album, 2004’s Good News for People Who Love Bad News, appeared at an odd, off-kilter moment in pop history. The walls between the mainstream and the underground had come unexpectedly tumbling down. Suddenly the freaks were storming the gates and such unlikely stars as the Arcade Fire, the Walkmen and Death Cab for Cutie were garnering radio play and album sales. The cause is unclear – it’s possible that the teen melodrama The OC is a much greater cultural arbiter than most of us would like to admit, or else it’s just a cyclical thing, no different from the grunge explosion that had the record-label suits raiding the Pacific Northwest, signing everybody in a flannel shirt and dirty jeans, or the early seventies, when the hippies and weirdoes reigned supreme. In any case, we had such a moment about five years ago, and it led to the supremely weird spectacle of slouch-eyed, misanthropic indie heroes Modest Mouse being covered by the entire cast of American Idol in a Ford commercial.

Singer Isaac Brock and his band of unmerry men walked right into the bright lights, unblinking. Good News… happened to be their catchiest and most accessible album, but it didn’t represent a major departure from their jerky sound or ramshackle aesthetic of millennial dread, speedball anxiety and gut-bucket poetry. It did boast the single "Float On", an ice cream cone of a song, their most delicious and hopeful track to date, a magical pop number by a little indie band that improbably found its proper home on the radios and in the ears of millions of listeners. But "Float On" was an anomaly – becoming the owners of a smash hit single didn’t turn Modest Mouse into a pop group. By the time their next album, We Were Dead Before the Ship Even Sank, debuted at #1 on the Billboard charts (!) they were largely back to their old miserablist antics.

Their new album, No One’s First and You’re Next, is a collection of odds and ends, recent singles, B-sides and outtakes. These are leftovers? They don't sound like castoffs to me -- they sound like album tracks. Half of the songs here are as good as anything on We Were Dead…. Impressively, these eight songs that didn’t make it onto the LPs could serve as a primer for Modest Mouse, showing a skillful and idiosyncratic band at the height of its powers.

Brock's trademarks -- his half-swallowed yawp, his catchy little melodies that get bitten off before they're able to resolve -– have been slightly toned down, but they’re still ever-present. "Guilty Cocker Spaniels" is one of the best showcases yet for his charming bozo squawk -- he yelps the talk-song at you, lending the shaggy-dog lyrics a palpable urgency. Brock sounds like the cranky drunk at the end of the bar, holding forth hilariously and slightly annoyingly on his philosophies and grievances, until, out of nowhere, a battalion of Johnny Marr’s buzzing guitars storm the place, nearly drowning out the semi-coherent rambling. It’s an unexpected moment, two unrelated songs suddenly colliding like ships in the night, neither willing to give way to the other; they somehow carry on together, half broken, sailing slowly off into the dark as the pieces fall away.

The rollicking, melodic “Autumn Beds” proves that even on auto-pilot, Modest Mouse can deliver the goods. Armed with little more than a lovely meandering banjo figure, a mellow country-rock rhythm and an endlessly repeated lyric ("We won't be sleeping in our autumn beds."), the track is unassumingly beautiful, pretty in a way that the group rarely is. Brock's increasingly willing to lay down his quirky vocal tics and just sing, reaching for something elegiac and lovely, if only for moments here and there. It’s a track that reminds you just how little these people need in the way of tools. Their usual moves – Brock’s anxious staccato guitar lines and odd vocals, Jeremiah Green’s rubbery, jazz-influenced drumming, strengths on display throughout the record – are conspicuously absent for this one track, and it’s one of their best. Maybe that explains the little grace notes, the sly smiles, the hints of increasing mellowness and accessibility that have begun seeping into Modest Mouse albums. Growing more comfortable with their talents, maybe they’re learning that you don’t always have to work so hard and worry so much. Sometimes, you can just float on.

Of Montreal: Skeletal Lamping

"It reminds me of a string of wet sponges; it reminds me of tattered washing on the line; it reminds me of stale bean soup, of college yells, of dogs barking idiotically through endless nights. It is so bad that a sort of grandeur creeps into it. It drags itself out of the dark abysm of pish, and crawls insanely up the topmost pinnacle of posh. It is rumble and bumble. It is flap and doodle. It is balder and dash."

That's H.L. Mencken elucidating with precision my attitude towards music criticism. Actually, that's my attitude towards GOOD music criticism -- flap and doodle, marked by a grandeur of badness, is the state towards which music criticism aspires. "But," you, gentle imaginary reader, say, "aren't you Dr. Teeth, that guy who writes all the lame music reviews on this site?" Yes, but I m also that guy who smokes cigarettes and masturbates regularly; a compulsion is a compulsion, and like a good nicotine rush or lesbian porn-induced orgasm, a rumbling, bumbling crawl through an abysm of pish can be a very nice, if hollow, pleasure. I'm old enough now that I no longer expect rock albums to save my life -- I'm perfectly comfortable, most of the time, with using them as nothing more than sensual treats, intellectual curiosities, and occasions for extended bloviation.

But sometimes an album refuses to be reviewed. A record feels too big and artful and strange to be crammed into a four hundred word essay. You find yourself unable to assume that unearned voice of authority that makes criticism comfortable. So you write a largely incoherent, rambling introduction riffing on H.L. Mencken in order to delay the inevitable. Then you write a bizarrely self-aware second paragraph discussing your first paragraph to delay it further. All because you don't want to write a review that's less criticism than shrill, hyperbolic hucksterism.

I should really stop here. One shouldn't review an album while still in the puppy days of salad love. It's the music critic's equivalent of going to the supermarket hungry: you come home and realize that your shopping bags are filled with nothing but Oreos and adjectives. (Third paragraph now, and still no mention of the album. I'm starting to think I can make it all the way through this thing without talking about anything but myself.) So, please, don't think of the following as a music review. Think of it as an exhortation, a shill, a terrorist demand.

----

The odd, pop-minded non-Canadian band Of Montreal tread into odder, funkier territory on their wondrous new record Skeletal Lamping, released today on Polyvinyl. Structured less as a traditional album than a series of mash-ups, frontman and general mastermind Kevin Barnes spits hooks at a breakneck pace, rarely slowing long enough for his jagged little shards of song to sink in or even fully register. The fifteen tracks on the disc seem to be divided somewhat randomly, and perhaps a more accurate track listing would reveal the album as hundreds of tiny songs, united by their thematic elements: sex, psychosis, paranoia, sex, the multiplicity of perception, and sex. Gleefully blowing the doors off of the polite mausoleum that much of indie rock has become, Barnes crafts a vision of human sexuality that's both titillating and frightening in its candor and danger. Prince-like in both his obsessive, live-wire sexuality and his ability to craft impossibly itchy, spine-tingling hooks, he's pulling a Justin Timberlake for the hipster set: he's bringing sexy back.

As with all Of Montreal albums, there's a fair amount of cognitive dissonance between the delectably catchy sound of the music and the tortured, schizoid nature of the lyrics. Unlike their previous records, though, here this stylistic tic works in sync with their conceptual vision. Like sex itself, the album is overwhelmingly pleasurable, but anyone who looks a little deeper can see what's underpinning the ecstasy: a complex cocktail of fear, guilt and desperation, so ugly that it attains a weirdly transcendent beauty. A lyric like "I confess to being quite charmed by your feminine effects; you're the only one with whom I would role-play Oedipus Rex," reads as funny and gross on the page, but coming in the middle of the garden of sensual delights that is "Plastis Wafers," it sounds complex, disturbing and admirable in its honesty. There's an intense sexual narcissism about the album -- rather than navel gazing perhaps we should call it penis gazing -- but it's a necessary narcissism, a narcissism without which this level of dizzying self-examination and -awareness would not be possible.

In my usual reviews, this would be the moment when I attempted to describe the sound of the music, perhaps using phrases like "glissando bass lines" or "cascading piano arpeggios" to create the illusion that I know what the fuck I'm talking about. But on an album as instrumentally rich, multifarious and fractured as Skeletal Lamping, it's almost impossible to do (at least in a few paragraphs). Shifting styles as quickly and easily as he does sexual identities, Barnes will ram a disco earworm head on into an Abbey Road piano singalong, then suddenly deke into a nasty, bass-driven, white-boy funk jam, all in the space of two minutes. There’s no way this should work, and at best I should be describing it as some sort of glorious mess, but somehow there’s nothing remotely messy about this record. There’s a unity and coherence to Skeletal Lamping that belies the modular, restlessly ADD construction. It’s a rich treasure trove of wildly different sounds and moods and melodies, yet somehow it feels all of a piece, a Major Work in the sense that people used to use to discuss new albums by the Beach Boys or Beatles, back when widely accessible pop was taken seriously as art. Lately the bands that are taken seriously have become the ivory tower bands, locked far away from the mindless masses, performing impressive feats of musical esotericism for their enlightened listeners. Bands like Deerhoof and No Age and Grizzly Bear, all of whom have in-born tendencies towards excellent pop, tend to smother those instincts in alienating dissonance by way of apologia, as though they feel guilty for their ability to give pleasure. Kevin Barnes, though, is a showman at heart, and his drive to entertain is at least as strong as his drive to challenge his audience. Based on its construction, Skeletal Lamping should be a frustrating, difficult album -- melodic and rhythmic fragments that would qualify as major discoveries for most bands, around which singles and even entire albums could be built, are thrown away in a few seconds -- but the sheer volume of musical ideas contained on the record is staggering and awesome, as is Barnes’ willingness to treat magical, hypnotic melodies as mere ornamentation, appearing and then immediately vanishing into the flood. There's hardly anything resembling a chorus on the record -- once a section is over, it's generally gone for good, as though with this much ground to cover there's no time to reprise anything. In most songs a line like "I want to make you come two hundred times a day" would sound like a joke or a silly boast, but, coming from the creator of an album this sensually rich and dense, it sounds like a good-faith promise.

I suspect that, due to the incredibly bizarre, explicit lyrical content and unusual construction, Skeletal Lamping will not find the wide, boundary-crossing audience it deserves. We will continue to live in an indie-rock landscape in which Art is for the educated and the masochistic, and pop is not supposed to have experimentation, depth or meaning. I’d like to hear "Plastis Wafers" remixed to blare in hip-hop clubs, "Id Engager" in regular rotation on top forty radio. That’s why this is less a review than a form of advertising – I really want you to go out and buy this album. I want the masses to embrace the unusual in a way that they haven’t since the release of OK Computer. Otherwise, this strange and beautiful album will be relegated to the indie rock fans, who will doubtless be suspicious of its overwhelming melodic appeal and immediacy. (Like everybody’s favorite hipster douchebags, Pitchfork, who just hours ago rated it a mediocre 5.9. Sorry, did I say hipster douchebags? I meant to say “hire me please!”)

So, to reiterate: reviews are dumb, and I’m a shill, but don’t let that stop you from going to the store on and buying a copy of Skeletal Lamping. Buy several copies. Give them to your friends as gifts. Keep two for yourself, so you can listen to it in the bedroom and kitchen at the same time. Normally here I’d try to find some clever or poetic line with which to sum up my review, but I’m not trying to be a writer right now; I’m just a fan, telling you about something he loves. So I’ll sign off, in the manner of obsessive, hectoring fans, by repeating myself: buy this album. Even if it doesn't make you come two hundred times a day, it’ll make you feel alive.

Silver Jews: Lookout Mountain, Lookout Sea

I saw David Berman headlining at the Pitchfork Music Festival two years ago. He was in the midst of the first tour of his two-decade career, and the adoring throng in Chicago's Union Park may well have been the largest audience he'd ever faced. He took the stage nervously, stumbling a bit and carefully placing a folder of what looked like hand-written lyrics on a music stand in front of him. He mumbled and stuttered his way through “Albermarle Station” and a couple of other forgettable songs, each of which was met by thunderous applause from an extremely supportive, forgiving crowd. He finally found his voice on "Trains Across the Sea," intoning the lyrics hypnotically as the El went rattling by and the sun dropped into the water behind the bandstand. By his last encore, he seemed supremely confident, embellishing his deadpan croon with playful phrasings and ornaments. David Berman, who has gotten more lyrical mileage out of physical and spiritual discomfort than anyone this side of Lou Reed, sounded downright at ease.

Lookout Mountain, Lookout Sea, released today on Drag City, sounds like it was made by this fitter, happier Berman, with all the good and bad that implies. The change is one of tone, more than content. All the Silver Jews ingredients are there -- esoteric, viciously sarcastic lyrics wedded to cracked, off-kilter country rock, the acidic, somewhat tuneless baritone. But Berman's albums have often luxuriated in their own unfinishedness, the ramshackle, messy quality that lent them their immediacy -- this is the first that sounds finished. Polished, even.

Which is not to imply there's anything slick or complacent about the songs -- "Aloysius, Bluegrass Drummer" explodes out of the gate with a drum-roll and a frantic piano riff and refuses to cool as Berman sneers his way through a vengeful, twisted little romantic comedy. And I don't even mean that the songs sound happier -- "Suffering Jukebox", a heartrending lament for a neglected jukebox in a dingy bar, has to be one of the saddest songs ever written about an inanimate object. It floats in on a cloud of pedal-steel smoke that sounds like a cliché until you realize that it perfectly expresses the deadening misery of a life spent repeating the same old lines to distracted drunks. ("They never seem to turn you up loud, there are a lot of chatterboxes in this crowd.") "My Pillow is the Threshold" begins as a romantic lament from a guy who can only be with a girl in his dreams, then turns out to be about suicide ("Now I'm here for good, I won't leave you anymore,") -- a fact that only becomes clear in the last moments, when the mindless drone of the deep bass rises to overwhelm the song, illuminating a frightful foreboding that's been hidden in the music all along, somehow just beyond our notice like the twist that ends the slasher movie. So when I describe Lookout Mountain, Lookout Sea as "polished," I'm not referring to the sound or the content -- I mean that it sounds less like a desperate cry from the center of Berman's soul than an artfully conceived, well-crafted record.

The album is filled with idiosyncratic story-songs, which have never before been the Silver Jews' favored mode of expression. “San Francisco B.C.” is a brilliant, cinematic caper involving a jewelry heist, a murdered barber and a mysterious Oriental named Mr. Games. “Party Barge" is the heroic tale of, well, a party barge and the Coast Guard that tries in vain to shut the party down. (That song features a great call-and-response bit between the barge-partiers and the cops.) There are no devastating, laid-bare Berman tracks, no “Dallas” or “Pet Politics” to be found here, and it would be easy to shrug the album off, concluding that Berman does his best work when his life is on fire. Instead, he takes on a more writerly voice, exploring characters and ideas rather than his own personal pain. The razor-wit is there -- even a Silver Jews-by-numbers song like “Strange Victory, Strange Defeat” can contain a wonderfully sharp couplet like "What's with all the handsome grandsons in these rock band magazines? And what have they done with the fat ones, the bald and the goatee'd?" -- the miserablism has just been leavened slightly.

But, to my ears, there's always been something slightly redemptive about Berman's music. Something he glimpsed out beyond the despair -- beauty or light or even death -- that made all the doom and gloom at least halfway worthwhile. Even great downers like "Smith and Jones Forever," about glue-sniffing killers sentenced to the electric chair, have a grandiose quality -- not by way of apologia, but by way of sincere commitment to the story of these born losers who disappear into a self-destructive holocaust entirely of their own making. The story is nihilistic in the extreme, but the portrait is humanizing, even slightly touching. There’s warmth, empathy behind all the misanthropic sarcasm, and it’s clearer on this album than ever before.

Lookout Mountain, Lookout Sea closes with "We Could be Looking for the Same Thing," a heartsick plea for love -- derivative, familiar and entirely unclever, but moving just the same. We're reminded that behind all the wordplay and mystery, behind the prophetic junkie persona, the fundamental reason we connect with Berman's albums might be that we share his exquisite sense of longing and the hope -- the tattered, distant, extremely Jewish form of hope -- that tinges all the despair. Berman is who he is because he's able to affect us even when he comes before us with no tricks and no tools. Lookout Mountain, Lookout Sea is the first Silver Jews album that has ever left me feeling bright, even uplifted. Whether we call that breaking new ground or losing his edge says less about Berman than it does about you and me.

Shearwater: Rook

Okkervil River leapt to quasi-fame last year with the release of The Stage Names, an album chronicling the miseries, frustrations and rare pleasures of life on the indie rock's B-list. The Stage Names debuted to rapturous critical praise and sold over 10,000 copies in its opening week. Last month, keyboardist and multi-instrumentalist Jonathan Meiburg announced he was leaving Okkervil River to focus on the Shearwater, a project he co-founded with OR lead singer Will Sheff. (Sheff is no longer with the band.) Just as a rising tide was carrying all ships, Meiburg decided to jump overboard and make haste for the ocean floor. It's an admirable decision, one that officially declares that Shearwater is nobody's side project.

Their new album, Rook, makes it clear why Okkervil River's direction didn't jibe with Meiburg's vision. Instead of the solid, meaty songwriting, the clever lyrics and catchy choruses in which Sheff specializes, we have an album made up of bits and pieces, ebbs and floes of incidental noise and repeating loops -- not a sing-along in sight. It's less than six degrees away from melancholy cocktail party music -- for a moment it's tempting to dismiss the album as lovely sonic wallpaper, the sort of pretty, fragile snoozer that bands like Iron & Wine and Death Cab for Cutie churn out by the dozen. The first track, "On the Death of the Waters," is delicate, haunting, and barely audible -- it would fit comfortably on any number of lesser indie rock records -- until a deafening hi-hat crash, discordant horn blast and manic keyboard arpeggio rip unexpectedly through the quiet. Before long the volume falls out and we're left only with a distant tinkling piano, but notice has been served -- this will not be another album to fall asleep to.

The opener is immediately followed by the title song and single “Rook”, with its resolute percussion, and carefully enunciated vocals, understated yet confident, even commanding. The bridge is provided by a ominous trumpet sounding off in the distance somewhere -- an intruder from another song, come only to issue a few spacious brass notes of foreboding, then beat a hasty retreat back to the set of "For a Few Dollars More." Brimming with unexpected oddball moments like this, Rook is the rare album that that's quiet and mournful without once feeling lazy, predictable or detached.

Of course, all the starry-eyed abstraction can be a little much, and I sometimes miss the cinematic immediacy of Okkervil River. The lyrics are half balderdash, with a lot of psuedo-Keatsian rambling about falconers and leviathans, interrupted by sudden moments of startling, devastating directness. On "Home Life," when Meiburg sings "When you were a child you were a tomboy, and your mother laughed at the serious way you looked at her," the words feel much more lived-in and honest than all of his elliptical meditations on the natural world. (Meiburg is an ornithologist with a masters degree in geography, so his dedication to the land is at least genuine.) Mundane lines like these redeem all the poetry -- "Home Life" is an epic of nearly 8 minutes, and by the end, when the instruments begin to fall away and Meiburg sings "Horse without rider, lungs without breathing, day without light, a song without singing... a song," the words are both darkly frightening and warmly enveloping. The music is slinky and furrow-browed, and the singer sounds utterly lost. The poetry feels natural, not written, and we feel enraptured and alive, glad to be adrift in Meiburg's strange dream.

Ultimately, this effect of lyrical inconsistencies and shredded, patched-up songs feels less like a flaw than a unique vision. Rook is a troubled, difficult album, an album that resists intent listening and yet refuses to fade into the background. The way the soporific butts up against the electrifying in these etched-out, discordant lullabies creates the sense of twisting the radio knob on a dream. And if Meiburg’s radio-dreams are all of seascapes and archipelagoes, of birds plunging down through clouds that cling to salty cliffs -- Freudian clichés, to be sure, but lovely ones just the same -- we're no less lucky to be invited in through all that static, spume and spray.