Modest Mouse

We Were Dead Before The Ship Even Sank

[4/5] Of the readers who’ve been thumbing through this magazine since the mid-’90s, how many of you thought you’d be reading a review of the new Modest Mouse record in 2007? Two, maybe three of you? Whatever the exact number, it seems safe to assume that very few people old enough to remember Isaac Brock & Co. back when they were still putting out 7-inches on mailorder indie labels really expected them to be around 10 years later.
After all, this is a band who have lived such a ridiculously troubled existence, they probably should have imploded after their first tour. If VH1 ever decides to film an episode of Behind The Music on the band, it would include run-ins with the law, insane in-studio blowouts and, to the shock of many, a huge career turnabout following the 2004 release of Good News For People Who Love Bad News, a surprisingly optimistic album that went on to sell over a million copies, as well as churn out the ubiquitous radio hit “Float On.”

Whether that mainstream success will happen with this follow-up is a bit harder to say. Modest Mouse have never quite made music for the masses, and with the exception of the disc’s first single, “Dashboard,” an anxiously strummed sing-along that’s touched with swaying Dixieland horns, there isn’t another song on We Were Dead Before The Ship Even Sank that seems primed even for alternative radio airplay. Instead, Brock and his bandmates have filled the album with the kind of guitar-heavy dirges and poignant ballads that long ago turned them into blue-collar indie-rock gods.

In fact, much of We Were Dead feels like a culmination of the sound that Modest Mouse have spent the last decade or so honing. Want to hear some of the band’s patented angular riffs? See the album’s amped up closer “Invisible.” Looking for some of their time-tested, drugged out guitar lines? Cue up “Little Motel,” which benefits greatly from their newest member, former Smiths guitarist Johnny Marr. Brock is in fine form lyrically as well, as he loosely tells the story of a doomed boat crew who apparently set sail during the stomping opener “March Into The Sea,” and who are later embraced by some sort of robotic messiah near the album’s dramatic end.

By that point, however, We Were Dead’s boat-crew narrative merely feels like another dedication to the wanderers of this world. Brock has covered this territory before, but here it feels incredibly suiting. Like his fellow drifters, the resilient Modest Mouse frontman has spent the last 10 years following his muse wherever it takes him. And while the road has been rough in stretches, the ride has ultimately been worth it, if only because it lead Brock to an album this great. (EPIC) Trevor Kelley

ROCKS LIKE:

Modest Mouse’s The Moon & Antarctica

The The’s Dusk

Wolf Parade’s Apologies To The Queen Mary

TRACK LISTING

1. March Into The Sea

2. Dashboard

3. Fire It Up

4. Florida

5. Parting Of The Sensory

6. Missed The Boat

7. We’ve Got Everything

8. Fly Trapped In A Jar

9. Education

10. Little Motel

11. Steam Engenius

12. Spitting Venom

13. People As Places As People

14. Invisible