Modest Mouse “Strangers to Ourselves”
When David Byrne famously asked “how did I get here,” the question was mostly rhetorical. Though he partially answered himself in the preceding lyrics, he was drawing a character more than he was genuinely inquiring. The line is both a provocation for the chorus as well as a suggestion of a certain kind of ennui -- that feeling of having everything you thought you wanted but realizing that you feel empty nevertheless. But he’s not literally asking. He’s not wondering how he and the band got from their home to the studio or the concert. He’s not asking how his American mother and Scottish father met and married and conceived him. And he’s certainly not asking why he and his band, and not Patti Smith, Television, The Ramones, Blondie or Richard Hell, became international Pop stars.
That last question, however, may have been a fair one. I mean, the Talking Heads were genuinely odd. Patti, meanwhile, was iconic and musically simpler. Television were handsome critical darlings. The Ramones had the best brand. Blondie was the most photogenic. And Richard Hell was probably the coolest. By almost any any standard, The Talking Heads were unlikely winners. They were art school kids, produced by Brian Eno, who made white Funk music with synthesizers and African beats. They dressed weird. Anxiety was their primary medium. But, for nearly a decade, they were platinum selling Rock stars.
As unlikely as The Talking Heads ascent was, it seems positively ho hum compared to the rise of Modest Mouse. Talking Heads were bougie. They went to college. They came from smaller cities and landed in the big city. Modest Mouse were none of those things. They were teenagers from the wrong kind of suburb — just a little too far from Seattle. And though they appeared “college aged,” higher education was far from their plans. Their lead singer grew up in trailers and communes and cults (depending on which story you’ve heard). From the outset, there was no doubt that the trio was inordinately smart and sensitive — possibly even “touched.” But they were also noisy and unkempt. They dared to co-mingle Hardcore with Folk music. And though they were from the Northwest, they bore no relation to Grunge. They were not cool like the Portland bands. They were too alpha to be part of the Grrrl Punk scene. And though they loved — and were beloved by — Calvin Johnson, they were not precious enough to fit into the K Records stable.
In the early 1990s, Modest Mouse seemed like a mutation. And Isaac Brock was their feral frontman. They were a band of outside cats. You wouldn’t actually try to invite them into your home. The idea of taming them seemed impossible. That they might become famous Rock stars was ludicrous. Vegas would not have put out odds on that proposition. In 1994, I had the incredible fortune of seeing them play live and though they were vital and electric and intermittently astounding, they were also sloppy, off kilter and abrasive. I simply presumed that they would soon flame out or mutate again — just like Lync and Heatmiser and every other great footnote from the scene. But, if I had been forced to predict their outcome back then — before “This Is a Long Drive for Someone with Nothing to Think About” — I would have guessed that they had a couple of seven inches in them and maybe one full length. I’d have wagered that they’d be only barely remembered as a messy, occasionally brilliant kissing cousin of Built to Spill. Nothing more. And, of course, I would have been wildly incorrect.
And yet, I could not deny that there was something about them. They looked so young, more like teenage misfits than college kids. And that sound -- loud and weird, like the early Pixies, but also searing like Hardcore. Occasionally howling like Tom Waits or sad like Elliott Smith. It was an unlikely recipe, the kind that sounds grotesque when it's written down but is delicious when the flavors hit right. Additionally, and in spite of the oddness and unpredictability, people quickly took to the band. Some of it was those familiar influences. Some of it was their wounded youthfulness. But I suspect a lot of it was Isaac Brock, the untamed, almost country boy who had words and ideas that were just a little different. His songs were disarming. And he sang them with a lisp. You didn’t know whether to worry about him or marvel at him. Most early fans did a little of both.
That early concert I attended and those early fanzine reviews I read, however, did not prepare me for what was to come. Between 1995 and 1998, Modest Mouse transformed from a bunch of endearing, wobbly, glue sniffing kids into Indie Rock canon. The release of “This is a Long Drive…” and then “Lonesome Crowded West,” just eighteen months apart, was staggering. In less than two years, Isaac Brock, Jeremiah Green and Eric Judy outdrove, outdrank, outpopped and outplayed the competition. Before Indie Rock bands could also have mainstream, hit records, they quickly reached the genre’s ceiling. They were right behind Pavement, up there with Yo La Tengo and Cat Power and -- yes -- Built to Spill. And unlike the fey, hipness of other Indie bands, Modest Mouse fucking cared. Probably too much. Their songs sounded like screams for help or exorcisms or tearful admissions. Even when they were bored, driving for days on end on cheap drugs, you could feel their boredom. Those first two albums -- thirty one songs and almost two and a half hours in length -- were as savage as they were fully-formed. Those feral cats, it turned out, were secretly lions.
The band’s unlikely success, however, was only surpassed by their implausible careerism. Just before the new millennium, during a time when “selling out” was still punished with scarlet letters by Indie purists, Modest Mouse signed to Sony’s Epic Records. The oddness of the pairing was unmistakable. It was one thing for Sony to sign Pearl Jam. Even Rage Against the Machine made practical sense -- the rebels got their platform and the corporation got their zeitgeist. But Modest Mouse were neither of those bands. Their lead singer was possibly a tweeker and definitely a drunk. Their drummer seemed to have a too fragile constitution. And their bassist was outnumbered. Moreover, there was not a radio-friendly song to be found on their first two albums. Unless the executives at Epic had a clever plan for “Doin’ the Cockroach,” the signing seemed doomed. For their part, Modest Mouse appeared unaffected by the curiosity. They had no money. They had no pretense. They liked the folks at the label — they were complementary and seemed smart enough and paid for dinners. Modest Mouse didn’t fear selling out. They feared doing all this work and having nothing to show for it.
That whirlwind from 1995 to 1999 -- the two masterpieces, the tens of thousands of miles in vans, the delirious shows, the drugs, the hangovers, the selling out -- somehow all of that was just a prologue for what would follow. They released “The Moon and Antarctica” in 2000, outselling pretty much any Indie Rock album before it, while keeping their fans and critics enthused. They continued to tour incessantly, graduating from clubs to theaters to festivals stages and small arenas. There was a time, not too long before, when meeting Calvin Johnson seemed like a plausible apex for Modest Mouse. But then they made “This is a Long Drive…” And then they made “Lonesome Crowded West.” And then they signed to a major label, made another excellent record and (steam)rolled their eyes at the idea of “selling out.” By 2003, the band had survived a decade -- longer than The Pixies and about as long as The Talking Heads. It was a fair moment to wonder: “how did we get here?” And moreover: “where do we go next?”
The answers to those questions, of course, were even more implausible than everything that had come before. Modest Mouse had survived sleepness days and nights and broken down vans and chaotic shows. They’d survived arrests and attacks and allegations. Their highs were Everest-y and their lows were hellish. But — even still — none of that could have prepared the band for the departure of drummer Jeremiah Green or the success of “Float On.” Green, who’d always presented as unusually quiet and sensitive, left Modest Mouse in 2003 to tend to his mental health. Modest Mouse kept his seat warm, but replaced temporarily him with Benjamin Weikel on drums, and officially added sometimes member Dann Gallucci on guitars. That quartet, plus Tom Peloso on fiddle and upright bass, recorded what would become “Good News for People Who Love Bad News.”
Released in the spring of 2004, “Good News” was a shockingly popular album from an inconceivably odd source. There was nothing like them on the radio. Or MTV. Their lead singer was hard to follow, was not telegenic, and was somehow both too forthcoming and kind of paranoid. Before 2004, the biggest Indie Rock bands sold fifty to one hundred thousand albums in America. Sonic Youth accidentally sold a bunch more for Geffen Records at the height of the “Alt Revolution.” That was an outlier. Pavement could reliably sell over a hundred thousand albums. But they were it — they were the unicorn. There was really no such thing as a platinum-selling Indie Rock band — until Modest Mouse. For two years, in every English speaking country around the world, “Good News” was a massive album and “Float On” was an even bigger single. Today, that sentence reads as fact. But, in 2004, it sounded like Martian.
How it all happened is hard to figure out, but it might have something to do with Adam Brody, the young actor who played Seth Cohen on “The O.C.” — a hit show for Fox between 2003 and 2007. Brody was a charming, kind of stereotypical, Indie Rock dude — preppy, Chuck Taylors, bedheadish, cute. That he would like Modest Mouse made perfect sense. That showrunner Josh Schwartz might also like the band and might want to somehow include their music on an episode also seemed reasonable. But, for reasons that are still unclear, the writers and producers of “The O.C.” made Brody’s Indie Rock proclivities a central premise of the show. Indie name-dropping became a feature of almost every episode. The soundtrack to the series is a “Who’s Who” of early aughts, pop-leaning Indie stuff -- Franz Ferdinand, LCD Soundsystem, Bloc Party, Death Cab, Spoon. And a lot of Modest Mouse. The show included “Float On” in a season one episode and then invited the band to perform it “live” during season two. In 2000, hearing that Modest Mouse had signed to Epic Records sounded almost like a lark. But to see them all over TV and to hear them on the radio, in between Usher and Maroon Five, was something else altogether. “Surreal” barely captures it.
But that is precisely what happened. Modest Mouse got super famous and stayed famous. In 2006 Johnny Marr — yes, that Johnny Marr, yes Johnny Marr of The Smiths Johnny Marr — joined Modest Mouse and Jeremiah Green returned. The newer and bigger version of the band — six people in all — released “We Were Dead Before the Ship Even Sank” in 2007. By this point, Brock had moved to Portland, Oregon where he’d become something in between a local celebrity and tourist attraction. His house brimmed with taxidermy. His photo hung in the mayor’s office. His style — part twentieth century lumberjack, part nineteenth century sailor, part anxious futurist, part backwoods believer — landed him on “Portlandia” and in the dictionary under the term “Steampunk.”
“We Were Dead” was another huge hit — not as big as its predecessor, but still enormous. “Dashboard” was all over the radio and MTV. “Missed the Boat” had a seafaring, meme-able video. And the band had fully established itself as a festival-headlining act. As the group got literally bigger and the stakes got higher, though, their music got less excitable. The new album seemed to have a coat of lacquer on it. The singles were polished. The angles were rounded. Soon, critics began to turn while early fans were exhausted and confused. Personally, I’d been out of the loop for several years. As much as I liked Modest Mouse, I never loved them. From the very beginning, they scared me a little. I kept my distance. They were too unpredictable. Possibly dangerous. To me, their first wave of success seemed earned. I understood the price to earnings ratio. But I didn’t trust the second and third waves. It felt like a leap from equities into derivatives -- too complicated and possibly not rooted in common sense. I wasn’t part of any backlash. But, around 2005, I quietly walked away.
It would be another eight years after “We Were Dead” before Modest Mouse reemerged. In the interim, I’d gotten married and had three kids. Modest Mouse turned twenty. Their early albums were reissued with lots of pomp and circumstance. Pitchfork made a forty five minute documentary about “The Lonesome Crowded West.” On the surface, Isaac Brock had plenty of reasons to be happy. He had his uber-successful band, his very own record label (Glacial Pace) and a domestic partner (Lisa Molinaro). Things seemed shinier than ever. But just beneath the beeswax and mustache polish, shit was apparently still very complicated.
There has always been a sense that Isaac Brock was not made for this world. That he was touched by some artistic spirit but also, possibly fractured by some combination of nature and nurture. While his lyrics read like late twentieth century poetry his interviews sound alternately drunk, shy, paranoid, humble and lacking in boundaries. It’s almost as though his thoughts and feelings are too big for his body. At least, that’s how he appeared to me. And so, it made sense to me that he liked to drink and drug. Twenty years into Modest Mouse, however, it was unclear if anything had fundamentally changed in his constitution or his methods of coping. By most accounts, including his own, he simply loved cocaine and Adderall and psychedelics and booze. Drugs were a big part of his life. They’d kept him almost cogent for three plus decades. Almost, but not fully. Isaac Brock was never Keith Richards. At his iconic worst, Keith seemed like a professional, unkillable drug user. In contrast, Isaac seemed like a lifelong amateur. And, while he often appeared untamable, he appeared all too mortal.
The weight of life and the fragility of science came to a head sometime after 2010. He got stuck on an endless loop. In spite of the uppers and the psychedelics, he could not find the muse. He labored over songs. He invited and then dismissed producers. He worked through sleeplessness. But he just couldn’t move forward. And so, he became consumed with the meaningless of it all. The death spiral. The destruction. The end of everything. And how we all knew it was coming and how we all distracted ourselves from it and how we vacationed and partied and Netflixed, full well knowing that we were all fucked. The new record he was making had a fatal skip in it. And, to compound matters, he was being stalked. In fact, he was being stalked by several people. In fact, according to Brock, he was being “gang stalked.” There is no question that he was in the throes of paranoia during this time, but — yes — he also really was being stalked.
It’s that version of Isaac Brock that eventually released “Strangers to Ourselves” in 2015. He was famous, in love, constantly working, paranoid, stuck and fucked up. Modest Mouse’s sixth full length credits eight people as members of the band (though not bassist Eric Judy, who left in 2012), twelve other musicians as contributors and five men (including Brock) as producers. The album was purportedly the first of a two part series, the second of which would be released as a fast follower (note: it never happened). Based partially on the massive bloat of the record, I leaned away — it sounded like a mess. Based on the rumors and the press, I kept leaning away, and then started to walk and then run in the opposite direction. I concluded — right or not — that fame and fortune and brilliance and love and drugs had not tamed Isaac Brock. Being nineteen and feral was one thing. Being on the cusp of forty and wild sounded tragic. So — yes — I skipped “Strangers.” When the local college station played the singles, I tuned out. I didn’t want to rubberneck. I just couldn’t.
It took me more than half a decade to return. Honestly, I’m not sure why I did. The reviews of “Strangers to Ourselves” were middling or worse. And it’s not like there was some recent reclamation of the album as some misunderstood, minor masterpiece. In the years following the album’s release, Brock had another run in with the law (not drug related), separated from Molinaro, had a second child and built the Ice Cream Party, his new recording studio. I didn’t have any evidence that he or his band had gotten mellower or that they’d returned to some old form. In my gut, I still wanted to stay away. But, one morning, I pressed play on “This is a Long Drive” and I fell in love, all over again. The next day, I took a deep breathe in and listened to “Strangers to Ourselves” for the very first time.
With the benefit of time, I was personally less anxious about the relative merits or shortcomings of “Strangers.” But, as it turned out, some of my apprehension was well founded. Whereas early Modest Mouse albums are sprawling and epic, their sixth record is long and erratic. It is musically diverse, to the point of being distracted. However, its ostensible thesis — that humankind, with the help of technology, is necessarily alienating itself from reality in order to avoid the micro and macro horrors of our existence — is consistent throughout. As philosophy, it, of course, rings true. It’s clear that the singer has spent years ruminating on the subject. He sees signs of his worldview in every strip mall, every parking lot, every gentrified neighborhood, every four star hotel, every television show and every Tweet he encounters. For the majority of fifteen songs, he cannot get past the facts: We are meaningless. We are all going to die. And we are doing everything imaginable to make our planet worse and our existence less valuable every single day. He’s not totally wrong. He’s not paranoid. But he absolutely sounds stuck.
Because older fans and writers generally loathed the sparkle of “We Were Dead,” and because the long hiatus portended disaster, there was modest enthusiasm when “Strangers” first came out. It was described, in complimentary terms, as “familiar.” The band was called “reliable” “stalwarts.” Reviews suggested that it was absolutely not the debacle that it could have been and that even a B- album from Modest Mouse was something of a gift. I think all of those things are true. But, of course, I hoped for more. Or less. I hoped for Punk Rock. I hoped for caterwauling guitars and a shrieking singer. I hoped for a cat that might — depending on the song — be a front porch cat or might be feral. But there’s none of that on “Strangers.” There are a lot of musical ideas — some of them very good and some of them less so. And there’s one frightening thought, played on repeat, for almost an hour. After eight years of waiting, and then another seven of my own delay, I guess I hoped for more from the man who once wrote “Dramamine.”
In truth, “Strangers” opens on a pretty, almost elegiac note. The title track features cello, a stomp and some bells, over faint, drooping guitar. The singer sounds tired and matter of fact. His life, like all lives, marches on in the face of the unfaceable. It doesn’t resemble anything else from their songbook. It sounds like something Isaac and Lisa figured out late one night when the former couldn’t fall asleep. It’s more Sufjan than Built to Spill. Thematically, it’s the opening salvo that the singer returns to. But musically, it’s unlike the rest of the album.
“Lampshades on Fire” is the irrepressible first single from the album. Jeremiah, who sounds like he could be the house drummer for DFA, plants a backbeat and Isaac scat raps over it for three minutes. It’s an infectious rhythm and a solid hook. It’s like “Float On” the hundredth time you’ve heard it. You recognize that it’s catchy and hitting some pleasure centers. But you also know that it’s a commercial object — it’s Isaac making a song for radio because he must and because he can. But it’s not why I come to Modest Mouse albums.
At its worse, “Strangers” is meandering and disjointed — exactly what you’d expect from an album that took eight years and more than five producers to birth. “Shit in Your Cut” channels some of Brock’s Ugly Casanova vibe — an old xylophone, clattering cymbals and a moody guitar. It’s a distant, lesser cousin of late eighties and nineties Tom Waits. But whereas Waits howls like a broken Gospel singer or reads like a Beat poet, Isaac nervously raps some more. Later, on "The Ground Walks, with Time in a Box,” Jeremiah tries a slicker beat while horns, synth scratches and a vibraphone make “Flintstones Rock.” Like Fred and Barney — it sounds both modern and stone age. It’s a patently weird concoction.
On “Bone Machine” Tom Waits was very carnal in his existentialism. He sang, “we’re all gonna be dirt in the ground.” That’s not enough for Isaac, though. That can’t be the end. On “Be Brave,” he tries to find a reason to persevere — to be better. But he returns to something more preachy and less spiritual than Waits:
Well the Earth doesn't care and we hardly even matter
We're just a bit more piss to push out its full bladder
And as our bodies break down into all their rocky little bits
Piled up under mountains of dirt and silt
And still, the world, it don't give a shit
“Strangers” is not all failed experiments and paranoid loops. In fact, some of the better songs are the odd detours. "Pistol (A. Cunanan, Miami, FL. 1996)" is a beatbox, a bong for a bass and a kinky hook, wrapped around a song about murder. As an idea, it might be heinous — I’m not sure. But, it sounds pretty great, like something Beck would do if he were writing a song for Marylin Manson. And I sincerely mean that as a compliment. “Sugar Boats” is a Steampunk anthem, wherein an old saloon piano backs Isaac as he extols the virtues of doomed, World War I submarines. And, the closer, “Of Course We Know,” is a final, ethereal meditation on the questions that are just beneath the surface of the album: “Why do we do these things?” “What have we become?” “How can we stop it?” Whereas Brock spends most of the record shouting fragments of answers, he is more contemplative in the end. The minor chords of the piano are naked, recalling Paul’s “Let it Be,” John’s “Imagine” and George’s “Isn’t It a Pity.” While it fails to achieve the timelessness of any of those songs, it’s not for lack of talent or ideas. If anything Isaac sounds like he has ten times the thoughts of his heroes, but perhaps only a tenth of the clarity.
“Strangers to Ourselves” is an exhausting album from an exhausted artist. It simply never coalesces. It tries desperately. It belabors. It spins plates upon plates. It hyperfunctions. And yet, somehow, it always sounds kind of safe. The music is frequently sharp and frustrated, but it’s never feral. There’s certainly some mid-life crisis about it all — Isaac turned forty the year it was released. I say this knowing almost nothing about Isaac Brock the person and but a fair amount about middle-age anxiety. However, “Stranger” is not counting fewer tomorrows than yesterdays. It’s an album that sees scorched earth in the future and the past. Similarly, it’s not a disaffected character asking “how did I get here?” It’s a real person — a weird and brilliant outsider who was forced inside, asking, “what the fuck is going on?”