By Claude Iosso
If there had been a roof at Marymoor Park the other night, Modest Mouse would have blown it off. With controlled fervor, the alt-rock combo delivered choice anthems from their vast repertoire, including the singles from this year’s The Golden Casket. Thousands of joyous fans, who spanned multiple generations, danced and sang along with all of the songs, old and new.
How is this happening?
When Isaac Brock, the quirky iconoclast who writes and sings the songs, started Modest Mouse in 1993 in nearby Issaquah, could he have imagined still winning new fans with new music nearly 30 years on? Could anyone?
The vast majority of musical artists make their mark with their first couple of albums, then ride the hits from that early burst for many years, if they manage to stay together (or reunite). They may continue to release records, but the audience just yawns. Even rock’n’roll titans such as the Rolling Stones and Bob Dylan eventually found the interest in their new stuff fade.
Not Modest Mouse. Golden Casket, their first album in six years, made number 12 on the Billboard Rock Albums chart, with the single “We Are Between” hitting number 1 on the Alternative Airplay chart. The band reached #1 on that chart one other time, with “Lampshades On Fire” from their 2015 LP Strangers to Ourselves. All this more than a decade after 2004’s “Float On” made them indie darlings, and nearly two decades after 1996’s “Dramamine” first got them some airplay on college and alternative radio.
The crowd was just as ecstatic when MM played “We Are Between” during the encore, right after “Dramamine.”
Is Brock, who relocated to East Portland in 2004, getting better with age? The Portland auteur has found a way to resonate across generations with his yelping, yelling and frantic, white-boy rapping. He’s got a wicked wit and a keen eye for the absurdities of life in the 2020s.
“Never fuck a spider on the fly,” he warns on the noisy but catchy rager from Golden Casket of that name. “If you do, you’re gonna find out soon, there’s still some web for you.”
While the bending guitar notes that marked Brock’s early work are less prominent, Modest Mouse has a lusher, more psychedelic palette of sounds. And the anthems keep coming. Drummer Jeremiah Green is the only other member of the band from the early days. Bassist/keyboardist Russell Higbee and guitarist Jim Fairchild probably deserve some credit here too.
Oh yeah, despite the pervasive shadows in Brock’s world view, a sunny edge peaks through. Surprising melodies and hopeful, or at least grounded, observations about our place in the cosmos are compelling. When I told people that I was going to see Modest Mouse, I was astonished at how nearly everyone, from 20-somethings to 50-somethings brightened and noted they were fans.
Maybe absence really does make the heart grow fonder. The gap between “Strangers” and “Casket” was six years, but “Strangers” was preceded by an eight-year hiatus, which is longer than the entire career of most bands.
While Brock struggled with alcoholism and abuse of other drugs early on in his career, the time away from the studio doesn’t seem to reflect any kind of crisis for him or his band. He has young children, dedicating the Golden Casket track “Lace Up Your Shoes” to his daughter maybe, so maybe he just decided to devote himself to being a dad. Kind of like Kate Bush, who dropped out of music for a long while for the challenges and rewards of parenthood.
Bush also reminds us of the trick Brock seems to be pulling. The idiosyncratic English chanteuse released luminous, surreal pop early on, but couldn’t find the lightning in the bottle when she finally got back in the studio after raising her son. Brock, meanwhile, keeps finding inspiration. When he poured the beer out of his bottle, he somehow filled it back up with lightning.
