Modest Mouse: The Moon and Antarctica

By Nathan Littlefield

I want to want to listen to this album more. I want to feel like patting Isaac Brock on the back for writing lyrics that have allowed Modest Mouse to evolve from their roots as three bratty, drunken trailer park kids. I can't fault the band for growing up, but I liked them better before they went out and discovered metaphysics, melancholy, and major labels.

And that's just what they've done. The Moon & Antarctica is the Issaquah, Wash. three-piece's first recording for Epic, and it's downright introspective at times. On 1997's The Fruit That Ate Itself, Brock screeched out the motions of suburban boredom: "Take a drive on the downtown train/Wake up sober get drunk again." Now, he sings, "The universe is shaped exactly like the earth/If you go straight along enough you end up where you were" on "3rd Planet," the opening track of The Moon & Antarctica.

It's the same ennui, the same tired life running between Denny's and the local strip mall, but now it has a sense of reflection, regret, even religion. "The third planet is sure they're being watched/By an eye in the sky that can't be stopped/When you get to the promised land/You're gonna shake the eye's hand," Brock muses later in "3rd Planet." At moments like this, when Modest Mouse match weirdly resonant lyrics with disjointed pop guitar, The Moon and Antarctica shows just how far they've come since their first lo-fi recording with Calvin Johnson.

However, the eye in the sky won't let lines like "How do you do/My name is you" go unpunished. That golden nugget of insight opens "Alone Down There," the second of three tracks that occupy the pathetic midpoint of the
15-song, hour-long album. The first, "Cold Part," says "So long to this cold, cold part of the world/So long to this bone-bleached part of the world"—Issaquah, a memory, a relationship? Who knows, and does it really matter? "Cold Part" is two minutes of quiet beauty that has the misfortune to precede "Alone Down There," a track whose title, arrangement, and Metaphysics-for-Dummies lyrics are eerily reminiscent of "Comfortably Numb." Not a good sign for a band that cut their teeth with Olympia's god of lo-fi. Next up there's the nine-minute-long "Stars are Projectors," featuring an interlude of fiddling over something that sounds like a distant performance of Riverdance. However, the album's last six tracks are strong and biting. "Wild Packs of Family Dogs," sickly funny with its spare, almost naïve guitar and harmonica, bounces perfectly into the next track, "Paper Thin Walls." "What People Are Made Of" closes out the album with two minutes of distorted vocals and noise that prove Modest Mouse haven't gone completely soft.

Flaws and all, The Moon & Antarctica is a strong album, but it's hard to get excited about it. Perhaps I'm nostalgic for Modest Mouse's old releases on Up, back before all these investigations into the universe and eternal life, when dropping This Is a Long Drive for Somebody with Nothing to Think About in my CD player and turning the volume up was just as much a nihilistic pleasure as Pussy Galore or the Stooges. You knew that the bands themselves gloried in being (or pretending to be) a bunch of assholes, you could hear that they wouldn't know musicianship if they broad-sided it in their car, but that wasn't the point. You listened to them because they were all noise and snot. For better and worse, Modest Mouse has cleaned up their act and moved to the majors. (Epic)

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