Modest Mouse’s second full-length release, The Lonesome Crowded West, strikes a sound somewhere between the Jesus Lizard’s deranged yowls and Built to Spill’s skippy guitars. Isaac Brock, on vox and guitar, concerns himself with the doomed fate of humanity, avoiding the self-centred angst so popular at the time of TLCW’s release, in favour of an existential dread sung for humanity as a whole. 

But TLCW is not a doom-laden record; it’s too frantic and, at times, funny for that.   Broken glass guitar lines and yelping vocals scratch out songs for the isolated, the disappointed and the dismayed, and Brock sings songs that are full of panic and heartbreak.  Perhaps less radio-friendly than the band’s later efforts, the album combines the raucous and the reflective, and has arguably come to define the feral, angular Modest Mouse sound and the desolate aesthetic of Isaac Brock’s lyrical concerns. Here and there, wild mountain violins pull on the frayed strings of your human heart, and your brain fills up with thoughts of dislocation and defeat.  The themes of alienation and disconnection are set as the band’s calling cards, and the no wave wired up skinny guitar nihilism sets this band apart from many of the ‘wall-of-superfuzz-sound’ bands that proliferated in the mid nineties, when this record was born. 

The album opens with the miniature epic Teeth Like God’s Shoeshine, a deranged bi-polar assault that rockets between sweet melodies and stormy screaming cyclones, leaving you shaken, shattered and shot to pieces.  When your ears have recovered from the cataclysmic lurch of this number, Heart Cooks Brain’s repetitive riff winds in, and its radio-static turntablism is low-key enough to soothe you, but not gentle enough so you can safely settle down.  TLCW was produced by K Records’ whacked out brother Mr Calvin Johnson, whose touch is heard most clearly on this second track.  Johnson’s junk shop aesthetic adds to the ramshackle philosophy of loneliness that underlines almost everything about this record.  A circular, bitty, frazzled riff repeats and repeats as "the ravens and the seagulls push each other inwards and outwards."  The fruitlessness and hopelessness of western life, the mechanical patterns of empty human interaction, a broken heart full up of nothing. 

But your heart doesn’t break out of self-pity, and, as mentioned, Isaac Brock’s words deal with the world beyond himself.  And what he sees are cockroach people, disconnected and alienated in bars, trailer parks and highways.  The title hints at this disconnected humanity, the tragedy of being stuck in traffic with a million other hopeless souls, the disappointment of disposable cutlery.  But it’s funny too, in a way that, say, Radiohead avoid when dealing with similar themes.  Some smart wordplay and black humour stop the record keeling over with a sombre thump.  The humour is at its strongest when Brock talks about God who, in Isaac’s eyes, is just a man, and as selfish and mean as any other.  As Brock sings on the last track, Styrofoam Boots/It’s All Nice on Ice Alright, “God takes care of himself and you of you.”  This final track is a gorgeous country ditty that violently erupts into madcap acoustic punk mayhem half way through, with Brock fecklessly screaming that it’s all nice on ice alright, re-enforcing the album’s idea that life, I’m afraid to tell you, is meaningless, and God, if he’s around, is worthy of nothing but your resentment.

But, within all this jagged screaming and black humour, there is an exquisite beauty, with gorgeous laments such as Trailer Trash and Bankrupt On Selling bringing some delicate moments to an album that sometimes feels like the edge of the end of the world.  Still, when the most triumphantly optimistic moment of the whole LP comes with the line “I’m trying, I’m trying to drink away the part of the day that I cannot sleep away,” it’s hard to describe this record with the old cliché that even though life is hard, the music offers hope.  It doesn’t.  What it does offer, however, is sincerity, passion, beauty and some of the best melodies, bedraggled and scary as they may be, to have come out of the US northwest since In Utero’s release in 1994.  And that at least is something worth trying for. 

Release date: 16/11/98
Artist website: www.modestmousemusic.com
Label: Matador

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