Published on Jun 1, 2004
Without a doubt, the big music success story for the first half
of 2004 has been Modest Mouse’s remarkable run on the Billboard
charts. The band spent almost ten years being indie darlings and
amassing a huge cult following. Their latest release,
Good News For People Who Love Bad News, doesn’t stray much
from their previous releases, but managed to debut near the top 20
with little publicity.
Why the success? Well, it could be that the album is simply
really, really good. But basically, the best way to sum up Modest
Mouse’s success is timing. The band wisely released
Good News For People Who Love Bad News in the spring,
generally a graveyard for major music releases. To top it off, most
records stores sold the album at an amazingly low price in its
first week (Best Buy had a price tag of only $7.99 — about the
cost of three gallons of gas). The lack of high-profile new
releases, combined with the relatively cheap price gave people who
have heard of the band, but not familiar with their music incentive
to make the purchase. And as a result, the album has been able to
remain fairly high on the charts based on great word-of-mouth and a
MTV buzz-bin status.
Good News For People Who Love Bad News has all the staples
of indie-geekdom: off-tune vocals, quirky guitar arrangements,
strange ornamentation (pump organs, ukulele) and hip literary
references (“Bukowski”). Indie-purists may claim that Pavement did
this a decade ago, but that band ripped off scores of punk bands in
the ’70s. Like Pavement, Modest Mouse has the knack for getting the
listener to endure head-scratchers such as “Bury Me With It” in
hopes that they will be treated to such ear candy as “The World At
Large.” The major difference between Pavement and Modest Mouse is
that Modest Mouse’s lyrics are typically far less abstract and
thus, much warmer than most of Pavement’s tunes.
Another great element of
Good News For People Who Love Bad News is that even their
most obscure songs have one or two poppy moments to place in your
brain, only to have them pop up in your head during a boring office
meeting, a trip to the grocery store or during a commute home. The
melodies eventually bounce and ricochet in your cranium like a
runaway superball in a racquetball court.
Good News For People Who Love Bad News doesn’t have the
amazing “you heard it here first” allure of their earlier releases,
namely
This Is A Long Drive For Someone With Nothing To Think About
(goodness, they do like long album titles). However, the album
breezes with confidence and maturity. The shuffling “Bukowski,” the
straightforward rock of “Float On” and the syncopated, almost
rap-like delivery of Isaac Brock’s lyrics have a coherence that
shouldn’t be there, given how much they throw to the table. Much
credit should be given to Eric Judy, Dann Gallucci and Benjamin
Weikel for making such schizophrenic sounds sound so uniformly
sweet.
The album closes with “The Good Times Are Killing Me,” with the
Flaming Lips backing up. It’s an appropriate gesture: alt-rock’s
most prolific elder statesmen next to Sonic Youth, passing the
alterna-torch to these soon-to-be-legends of college rock. The
alternative music scene is desperately trying to crown their next
idols, and Modest Mouse perfectly fits the bill. However, it’s
unlikely that you’ll see the band take an active role in assuming
the mantle for kings of alternative rock. They’re too cool for
that. That said, it must be comforting for the band to know that
with an album as good as
Good News For People Who Love Bad News, the mantle is theirs
for the taking, if they so choose.