Artist: Band
Career: recording since 1994
Language: English
Genre: Indie Rock
In retrospect, Modest Mouse and Neutral Milk Hotel are the bridge between American indie generations – they seemed like the first bands who’d grown up on indie and were ready to take it one step further, but in a closed off bubble from the rest of the musical universe (unless it was something really inappropriate like African highlife, say, something really forced, that was still okay). In practice it was still indie rock but everything more hyper – not as hyper as Animal Collective (that’s 3rd generation – they were just debuting in 2000), but certainly on the way there. Oh yeah, and with a fondness for 80s UK indie too (why and what’s the reason for , I’ll never know).
That always left me non-plussed when it came to Modest Mouse, even though people loaned me albums and talked them up, but I just wasn’t having it. Bunch of posers, the indie whiners now all wearing attention deficit badges.
So what’s this doing so high up? Well, you know, I had to force myself to listen to it three times, but then I started looking forward to at least the first half of it (this is a long record and it gets more idiosyncratic as it goes along – when he starts shouting down at people in wells so as they don’t have be down there alone and singing about members of his family being eaten by wolves you know you’ve crossed some kind of line), and so on… I still can’t relate in a rational way why it’s a good record, but leaving your critical sense at the door, surely the sign of a good record is not whether it fits into a preconceived set of values, but whether you feel good playing it again and getting to know it and marveling how much of it there is to get to know, how deep the well goes. Oh yeah, and there is some excellent, non-conformist guitar playing on this album.
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