Without a doubt, the big music success story for the first half
\nof 2004 has been Modest Mouse’s remarkable run on the Billboard
\ncharts. The band spent almost ten years being indie darlings and
\namassing a huge cult following. Their latest release,
\nGood News For People Who Love Bad News<\/i>, doesn’t stray much
\nfrom their previous releases, but managed to debut near the top 20
\nwith little publicity.<\/p>\n
Why the success? Well, it could be that the album is simply
\nreally, really good. But basically, the best way to sum up Modest
\nMouse’s success is timing. The band wisely released
\nGood News For People Who Love Bad News<\/i> in the spring,
\ngenerally a graveyard for major music releases. To top it off, most
\nrecords stores sold the album at an amazingly low price in its
\nfirst week (Best Buy had a price tag of only $7.99 — about the
\ncost of three gallons of gas). The lack of high-profile new
\nreleases, combined with the relatively cheap price gave people who
\nhave heard of the band, but not familiar with their music incentive
\nto make the purchase. And as a result, the album has been able to
\nremain fairly high on the charts based on great word-of-mouth and a
\nMTV buzz-bin status.<\/p>\n
\nGood News For People Who Love Bad News<\/i> has all the staples
\nof indie-geekdom: off-tune vocals, quirky guitar arrangements,
\nstrange ornamentation (pump organs, ukulele) and hip literary
\nreferences (“Bukowski”). Indie-purists may claim that Pavement did
\nthis a decade ago, but that band ripped off scores of punk bands in
\nthe ’70s. Like Pavement, Modest Mouse has the knack for getting the
\nlistener to endure head-scratchers such as “Bury Me With It” in
\nhopes that they will be treated to such ear candy as “The World At
\nLarge.” The major difference between Pavement and Modest Mouse is
\nthat Modest Mouse’s lyrics are typically far less abstract and
\nthus, much warmer than most of Pavement’s tunes.<\/p>\n
Another great element of
\nGood News For People Who Love Bad News<\/i> is that even their
\nmost obscure songs have one or two poppy moments to place in your
\nbrain, only to have them pop up in your head during a boring office
\nmeeting, a trip to the grocery store or during a commute home. The
\nmelodies eventually bounce and ricochet in your cranium like a
\nrunaway superball in a racquetball court.<\/p>\n
\nGood News For People Who Love Bad News<\/i> doesn’t have the
\namazing “you heard it here first” allure of their earlier releases,
\nnamely
\nThis Is A Long Drive For Someone With Nothing To Think About<\/i>
\n(goodness, they do like long album titles). However, the album
\nbreezes with confidence and maturity. The shuffling “Bukowski,” the
\nstraightforward rock of “Float On” and the syncopated, almost
\nrap-like delivery of Isaac Brock’s lyrics have a coherence that
\nshouldn’t be there, given how much they throw to the table. Much
\ncredit should be given to Eric Judy, Dann Gallucci and Benjamin
\nWeikel for making such schizophrenic sounds sound so uniformly
\nsweet.<\/p>\n
The album closes with “The Good Times Are Killing Me,” with the
\nFlaming Lips backing up. It’s an appropriate gesture: alt-rock’s
\nmost prolific elder statesmen next to Sonic Youth, passing the
\nalterna-torch to these soon-to-be-legends of college rock. The
\nalternative music scene is desperately trying to crown their next
\nidols, and Modest Mouse perfectly fits the bill. However, it’s
\nunlikely that you’ll see the band take an active role in assuming
\nthe mantle for kings of alternative rock. They’re too cool for
\nthat. That said, it must be comforting for the band to know that
\nwith an album as good as
\nGood News For People Who Love Bad News<\/i>, the mantle is theirs
\nfor the taking, if they so choose.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":26709,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"tags":[],"artist":[7024],"rating":[5613],"class_list":["post-37966","review","type-review","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","artist-modest-mouse","rating-rating-a-minus"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review\/37966","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/review"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=37966"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review\/37966\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/26709"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=37966"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=37966"},{"taxonomy":"artist","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/artist?post=37966"},{"taxonomy":"rating","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/rating?post=37966"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}