Goods News for People Who Love Bad News - Modest Mouse - Jacobs Review

Isaac Brock reminds me a of a dancing rat, in a cave, wearing dark sunglasses and slugging back moonshine. Like a blind mouse from a cartoon. When you emerge from the cave, after a night of psychadelic drug-infusion, you have a wicked hangover, in the middle of some field in the country, the sun peeking over the horizon.

It’s always been like this. Brock himself hails from the more rural parts of Washington state; not the Starbucks crowd but the folks over the Cascade mountains more prone to cow-tipping and moonshine. Perhaps it’s the pitch of his voice that takes me to this place or the memories I have of the Lonesome Crowded West, tripping on acid with Remy, watching Akira in the yellow house hearing the guy shout “this plane is totally crashing.”

The Moon and Antarctica was a revelatory step forward for the band. I was disappointed when I realized that producer Brian Deck wasn’t manning the boards for this one, the follow-up to The Moon, since it was that production that resonated for me. The scraping of stones against the chug of the acoustic guitar on ‘Gravity Kills Everything’ was magic well before the song appeared in that commercial for the min-van.

Goods News for People Who Love Bad News is a different animal altogether and, as Tom has pointed out, probably, on the whole, not much of a step forward if at all. You sort of understand it right from the beginning: the first few guitar lines, drenched in reverb, with Isaac Brock’s double-tracked vocals in ‘World At Large’ sound immediately familiar. Pretty much like almost every Modest Mouse song you might have ever heard. It’s striking for its sameness; the first few notes of The Moon and Antarctica immediately planted a flag in the ground. Not so here.

Still, the song represents much of what the band does well. The haunted, sleepy, dream-like guitar lines against the chanting background vocals with Brock moaning characteristically “Why does it always feel like I’m caught in an undertow?” Maybe he’s taken the idea of space and infinity, so prevalent in his last work, and applied it to the notion of our everyday existence or at least his own. Space, in essence, has become a big, large summer night with Ike heading for the coast.

The song leads into the one truly great moment on the entire album. ‘Float On’ continues the incorporation of Talking Heads influences worn so transparently on their sleeves in the Moon and Antarticas’s ‘Tiny Cities Made of Ashes’. They’ve taken it a step further, this time, and added that bouncy pop element to the grooving bass line and the shiny metallic guitar that Bryne popularized back in the 80s. Brock’s punchy vocal delivery works wonderfully in the verse, creating an uneasy, head-bobbing tension that crashes and is released into the chorus where synthesizers and keyboards create a soothing and smoothing wash of sound. It’s a great moment and one that ultimately undermines the rest of the album; I keep listening, waiting for that same moment of cathartic ephemeral release and can’t seem to find it, almost latching onto something in ‘Blame it on the Tetons’ but still not.

Unlike Tom, I think the first serious stumble comes not with ‘Danchall’ but with ‘The Ocean Breathes Salty’. After the joy of ‘Float On’, it just sounds like too much of the same for me. The vocals and the guitar lead immediately remind me of ‘World At Large’ when I’m just only one song removed from that listening experience.

The Moon and Antartica also had it’s difficult (read: boring) middle section, but that didn’t arrive until the 8th or 9th track. This time, I’m losing interest halfway through the first verse of the 4th song. It’s not a terrible song, mind you, just not very interesting. It ends with Brock telling me ‘You wasted life why wouldn’t you want to waste death’ changing ‘death’ to ‘the afterlife’ with his last chant. I raise an eyebrow but only briefly. I wasn’t listening to enough of the song to know who he’s talking about. Probably himself. It is an interesting idea since he seems obsessed with the idea of God, of the eternal, but only in as much as it implies his own powerlessness, somehow reinforcing the notion of futility. We’re all going to be around forever anyway, so what does anything matter. A metaphysical pun.

Beginning with the plucked banjo lines of ‘Dig Your Grave’, I sink deeper into my own middle section difficulties and don’t emerge, but for briefly, until the close of the album. For me, this is the true beginning of my dark and lonely night with Isaac Brock. I’m in the field, I took in the first few tracks. But now the hole in the ground opens up and I climb inside. There’s a small space in the top of the hole where the smoke from the fire escapes. There’s a single red bulb and a blanket in the corner that looks like it used to belong to Deke. There’s a dried turd in the other corner. Isaac Brock is a rat with a withered cane and he’s just shot a couple quarts of heroin into his hairy rat arm and I think he made me do the same thing because the music is really loud and it’s giving me a headache but I can’t focus on much. Sometimes it almost sounds good, like the chanting in ‘Dancehall’ and I feel like maybe I too want a dancehall, dancehall and it’s really digging and I’m digging. Sometimes it’s not.

I get the shakes, the furor dies down and that blasted banjo comes back into view. Brock the Rat is slumped in the corner, sweat streaming off the corners of his eyes and he’s motioning with his claw about theology. “Who would want to be, who would want to be such a control freak?” He waves the cane in the air and then passes out for awhile.

For ‘The Devil’s Work Day’, Tom Waits climbs into the hole. He’s wearing the same dark glasses the rat is wearing and he’s blowing a horn. There’s a crow on his shoulder. My headache is increasing. Waits tells me somebody died, somebody I know, and they’re floating in the river. I start to get scared.

By ‘The View’ I’m nearing the point of exhaustion. I just can’t do it anymore. Except, just before I’m about to throw in the towel completely, Brock brings me back to life with a surprising chorus that stretches out smooth and sweet like a neon highway with a pulsing keyboard sample and a nice vocal line and I’m awakened. Hey, this is a pretty cool song. I think I’m back. I’m out of the hole, lying in the field, and the sun is rising and I think I can make it to the end. My iPod tells me only 6 more songs to go. Maybe this was his intention the whole time. He says right towards the end ‘If it takes shit to make bliss, well I feel pretty blissfully.’ Ok. Cool. There’s a method to this mediocrity.

Oops. Spoke too soon. The ground falls out below me and ‘Satin in a Coffin’ comes in. I’m beginning to think Modest Mouse throws in these angular, non-melodic wailing songs with banjos to maintain their street cred the same way the Chili Peppers have to keep their albums real with white-funk songs that suck. I like dirt!

Later still, after a pleasing interlude with ‘Blame it on the Tetons’, I make it to ‘The Good Times are Killing Me’. It wraps up the personal journey quite nicely, both for me and for Brock. The optimism we saw in Float On is still here but Brock has had too much sadness to walk away without complications. He’s dying. All these fears, doubts, indecision, drugs, booze, lines of crushed pills. They’re taking their toll. It’s 7AM and he’s been up all night listening to the new Wilco album with Fast Eddie Giles and it could still work but the street sweepers are out and he’s aching with sadness and can’t focus on anything and he climbs into bed with his girlfriend and listens to his heart beating. The same way I feel listening to ‘Long Distance Drunk’ from two albums ago and that’s a good thing friends.

For me, a few good songs can't save the listener from a very long and difficult experience with this album. It’s a journey all right but ultimately I think making it shorter would have made one or two of those filler songs more relevant and more interesting. In all, I count about 4-5 good songs out of 16 total including 3 interludes. And the songs that are good, save for Float On, are not a step forward or towards anything, just treading water, content to be what they were and have been already and before, when they were fresh and new. Hanging out in that dark cave with a cast of unseemly characters and a lot of needles waiting for inspiration to hit.