On “Fuck Your Acid Trip” they take the strobing guitar trick onetime Mouse associate Johnny Marr pioneered on the Smiths’ “How Soon Is Now?” and cover it with handclaps, electro noise, and static - playing up the song’s lysergic lyrics - and while all of that is funny enough, it’s almost shocking when Brock sings the chorus, “We’ll figure it out,” because it’s so straightforward. But largely, the band would rather cloak its songs in layers of audio distractions. The Casket song with the simplest arrangement (which doesn’t arrive until track 10), “Leave a Light On,” sounds like a distant cousin of Screamadelica-era Primal Scream - it even has a chorus ready for a sing-along (“We’re leaving, we’ll be home soon”) and Brock’s signature irony (“Your heart’s where my house is”). “Some things aren’t visible,” he sings, “like yesterday, beams of light, cellphones calls.” A few tracks later, on the more upbeat “Japanese Trees,” he continues his Luddite sophistry, singing, “We’ll ditch our phones in the rest-stop bathroom.” And on “Wooden Soldiers,” a song whose xylophone-like tinkles and backwards guitar are as distracting as push notifications, he sings about “hashtagging, photo bragging.” It’s as if he’s saying, life is complicated these days, so here’s some complicated music to back that up.īut when Modest Mouse are able to get the hell out of the way of their own songs and cut loose, they can still come up with some memorable melodies - you just might need a machete to cleave a path to them.
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When he quits taking inventory, an act that incidentally sounds like a ham-fisted update of “We Didn’t Start the Fire” (without the history lessons or exciting cola wars), Brock’s point comes to the fore: modern life is too inundated with technology. The album’s most obtuse track, “Transmitting Receiving,” pairs Brock’s voice listing everything he can think of (actual lyrics: “vacuum cleaners, windows, lights, fans, scales, your smart device”) with glitchy, electro-damaged guitar chords.
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