Modest Mouse to bring ‘Lonesome Crowded West’ tour to Bay Area

I was around nine years quondam when I got my commencement MP3 player — a Zune, given to me past my older sister. Although I had wanted a cooler device like the iPod that had come out years before, I was nevertheless fairly excited to take my ain MP3 role player at all. It meant I could stop switching out CDs on my clunky actor and have my music in one space. Every bit I started upwards the Zune, I was expecting to discover the Britney Spears and Hilary Duff songs I had asked my sister to load. Instead, she had decided I needed to heed to some “real” music, and I found odd band names similar Modest Mouse. Reluctantly shuffling through the songs, one of the beginning I stumbled on was “Teeth Like God’s Shoeshine” from
The Lonesome Crowded Westward
and “The World At Big” from
Skillful News for People Who Love Bad News.

This wasn’t the bubblegum popular I was used to listening to, music that and so often focused on the emotions of being young or seeking love and a relationship. Information technology was adults talking nigh how hard life is, and how piece of cake it tin can be to get dragged down past it. And as a child who was experiencing a lot of abuse, showtime from a young historic period, and general disillusionment from a world that continuously failed me, their music spoke to me. Much of the pop music I’d listened to up to that signal focused on the kinds of problems I wished I could have, problems that were simpler, more child-like.
Modest Mouse seemed to dig into something deeper and more than depressing that I didn’t know anyone was allowed to talk about out loud — much less make music most it.

Modest Mouse’south sophomore anthology,

The Lonesome Crowded Due west,

presented paradoxes from the jump: The W is crowded, simply the speaker nonetheless finds it lonely; the songs are about motility forward toward the future, but as well isolation and stuckness. The mural of the album is one of purgatorial resignation, with intense instrumental riffs and desperate vocal pleas.

In “Teeth Like God’due south Shoeshine,” the speaker confronts how minor the world can feel despite how large the sprawling area around you is: “From the elevation of the ocean / From the lesser of the sky / Well, I get claustrophobic.” I knew immediately what Isaac Brock meant, equally he set the tone for the rest of the album: Sometimes it doesn’t matter how big the space around you is if your circumstances muzzle you in. You still experience helpless. The machinations of the earth are larger than what you lone can heal or even deport.

In “Bankrupt on Selling,” I learned that the strums of a guitar can remind you of what it feels like to exist stuck living a life you never asked for in the starting time place. Everything is changing before our optics: Strip malls taking over and gentrification getting worse, the capitalist greed of corporations consuming life. “Styrofoam Boots / It’s All Nice On Ice, Alright” confronts nihilism and questions God’south very existence, parallel to “Cowboy Dan,” which sees a man challenging God to a fight. Settling into the resignation present on the residuum of the album, “Styrofoam Boots” explores how fucked upwardly information technology is that so many live through such painful existences and yet still pray to a God that might not exist upward there at the end of the 24-hour interval.

The album is virtually the expiry of the “American dream” and how information technology’s set upwardly to fail the states, and the songs cover the knowledge that things are getting worse and sometimes all you tin can practise is shrink. Information technology’s existential and terrified, pining toward meaning — angry, and vulnerable, not attempting to fit into boxes. All this, and more, I understood when I kickoff listened to their songs for the offset time almost 2 decades ago.

Looking back at the album, it makes complete sense that it helped put the band on the map of indie rock greats. The musicians were able to translate both the desperation to understand why things work the fashion they practice and the remorse of finally having seen enough to understand.

In the
liner notes
 for the anthology’s reissue, Scott Swayze, who helped to produce the record, calls it “a raw stone record; a snapshot of the band at that point in time, with minimal embellishment.” And that rings true in listening to it. “It meanders between feelings of grinding teeth and soothing calm, love and heartache, promise and despair, with the mood and emotion shifting similar tumbleweeds on a gusty day.”

As someone whose life also felt defined by isolation and existential dread, the ring was one of the first whose music gave me insight into how all of these complex, darker emotions could sound out loud — not just in the lyrical sense, but by mode of instruments, too. In most of their music, broken-hearted guitar riffs ringlet around lyrics that mix dread with often calculated hopes for the future. Brock’s vox whines like he’s singing a eulogy at his own funeral.

And while

The Lonesome Crowded West

pinpointed the atmosphere of the pre-cyberspace 1990s, 25 years afterwards, these themes still deeply resonate, both with me personally and with the way social club has connected to unfold. Brock sings of what it’s like to be personally unraveled by historical happenings getting worse — something that feels impossible to command or handle as a singular person, and which felt prescient around the plow of the century and still relevant now. In the more than ii decades since the album was released, the state we alive in has only become more chaotic. The sense of doom from climate disaster, the feet of an ever-growing list of anti-trans bills, abiding police violence toward Black people and more are all bug constantly nagging me in the back of my head. I count the issues that be, the ones that abound worse every day, and the listing is like a doomsday clock hanging around my neck. The resulting anxiety is large, and I am likewise small to hold it some days. Waking upwards and getting out of bed, at times, presents a Sisyphean task. Somehow, though, Modest Mouse has fabricated music that contains those anxieties and the loneliness of trying to shoulder how heavy it all is. When I need visitor, I sit with the band’southward songs. I am reminded I am not the just one who has felt the weight of the earth at big.

Looking back at the anthology, it makes complete sense that it helped put the band on the map of indie rock greats. The musicians were able to translate both the desperation to understand why things work the mode they do and the remorse of finally having seen enough to understand.

Modest Mouse seemed to dig into something deeper and more depressing that I didn’t know anyone was allowed to talk about out loud — much less brand music about information technology.

For me, and I’thou certain many others, Pocket-size Mouse wasn’t just a portal into exploring how desperate emotions could sound out loud. This winding anthology was also an introduction to other weird bands that talked about difficult shit that would make people uncomfortable at parties, only is cracking to listen to alone in your room at nighttime, like Radiohead or the Pixies. Modest Mouse’s music strikes something in me that feels every bit foreign equally living does many days — and they’re honest most that, instead of trying to wrap it up in something that sounds pretty.

One of my favorite concepts from Judaism is tikkun olam — and so much and then that I have the words tattooed on my left arm next to an olive branch. The ideology sets forth that the world is cleaved into pieces, and each of us has the responsibleness to help put it back together. I recollect of this when I listen to this anthology, considering although

The Lonesome Crowded West

always reminds me that the machinations of the world indeed

are

 larger than what I alone tin can assist to set, it likewise reminds me in that location are others who see and feel all this. And if there are others who run into the destruction and feel gutted by it, then there are others out there who might want to work with me to aid turn some of this around.

Perhaps that’south a besides-hopeful have on a band that makes such depressing music. But I can’t assist it. I have never heard a death sentence in Modest Mouse’s music. Instead, I’ve heard in that location’s a chorus of other people out there who understand how much pain there is, and I’1000 non the only one facing it.

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Source: https://www.vinylmeplease.com/blogs/magazine/modest-mouse-lonesome-crowded-west-anniversary

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