Modest Mouse's Strangers to Ourselves, the band's first record since 2007, is a whirly-gig pop venture where the center (surprise!) cannot hold. While Isaac Brock's songwriting teeters at the edge of the absurd, he fearlessly clings to his emotional and intellectual honesty, and his doomed-planet diatribes, poetic and fierce, find fertile ground in this collection of guitar rock oddities.
The indie titans long-awaited return is welcome. Strangers features the usual gonzo guitar workouts and weirdo vocal theatrics from Brock, but the arrangements brim with new ideas and crackle with intensity, the result of a more fulsome production and instrumental accompaniment than anything the band has done before. Yes, the increasingly polished approach since 2004's popular breakthrough Good News for People Who Love Bad News has led some to wonder what happened to the inspired frenetics of the band's early, raw efforts. Long gone are the days of skewed and spare dynamics ala The Lonesome Crowded West. Put simply, Modest Mouse will never sound like this again.
Too easily dismissed in this discussion, however, is that the band now contains superior individual musicians than in its underground heyday, which includes the stunning growth of founding members Brock and Jeremiah Green. Brock is a bona fide guitar wizard with an instantly distinctive space-cowboy feel, while Green's varied work on the kit breathes life into the bizarro pop songs. As a result, Strangers delivers complex arrangements, heady background vocals, and strings, horns, and other assorted instruments for a full-bodied sonic experience that should be appreciated on its own merits without the baggage of classics like The Moon and Antarctica.
"Lampshades on Fire" is the band at its headlining best, a populist mishmash carried by Brock's carnival barker persona. "The Ground Walks, with Time in A Box" dives right into the crowd, a slinky rocker masquerading as the band's first dance track. In the often uninspired slew of indie rock, these two tracks are as interesting as it gets for widespread iTunes consumption.
The band still gets crazy, of course. "Pistol (A. Cunanan, Miami, FL, 1996)" is the creepiest, warped-out song you will hear all year, depicting the mind of the madman who killed Versace. "The Turtle and The Tourist" is a raging guitar mess, and sounds totally nuts in the best of ways. "Coyotes" is actually quite pretty as Brock sings about, well, coyotes.
My favorite tracks hit square between oddball and accessible, with Brock's incisive lyrics firing on all cylinders, his opening lines summing up his existential dread: "Pups to Dust" (Our hearts don't change from pups to dust / Couldn't see clearly, but I had a sense of what right and wrong was); "Sugar Boats" (This rock of ours is just some big mistake / And we will never know just where we go / Or where we have came from); "Wicked Campaign" (Well I just found the fence where I am going to lean / Take my handkerchief out and rub my eyeglasses clean). Brock's struggles with our opaque world speak to me, and when they are driven through the band's spiraling, off-kilter jams, they help me release pent up energy and exorcise any inexplicable demons.
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