THE DINER REVIEW IS BACK!Sooooo, the diner review was captured for March by the evil folks at KUBE and their illegal gambling consortium... very sad and a little bit...no a lot annoying. Those people. Anyway...except for some specific announcements related to KUBE happy hour these pages will go back to regular rants and reviews.
Modest Mouse
This Issac Brock guy. He seems to have some kind of ear but i still do not know what to do with him. There is some brilliance in him for sure as was seen by all the copies and buzz that surrounded the break through “Good News For People....” which I guess is like three years old now. “Float On”, “Bukowski” and my favorite “The Good Times Are Killing Me” provided some of the better anthems available for a while.
It is a big full sound he uses which often makes my old ears feel like it is just noise but...I don’t know. There is something about him. He has supposedly cut back his partying a great deal and he got himself a new guitarist but although there was all kinds of critical buzz... you cannot tell. He laughs over the opening waltz called “A March to the sea. He screams over several songs and generally floats his angst along with former Smith’s guitarist Johnnie Marr and he rips and rants in his own loveable way. This is not background music but is much more headphone music. The beat is relentless and intentional and that is what seperates it from so much other music of this genre. Every screach and squelch seems to have been placed intentionally. There is a LOT going on and the album is dense and sometimes even pretty in the way a cacophony can be pretty...occasionally.
The style becomes numbing sometimes but it is always interesting. When he gives the stoners a new anthem in “Fire It Up” you always suspect he might be talking about something else but he is too comfortable with whatever you inturpretation is. He combines with James mercer of the Shins for a warbling “Missed the Boat” and a few other songs but “Missed The Boat” is a high point. Marr’s solos throughout are nice and add a texture that was missing even on the last album.
What is nice about the album for me is that it belies the myth that when a band reaches the main stream and has a major label that they “sell out” and homogonize their sound and are just looking for hit. Brock’s sound is changing but, dare I say it, like Neil Young he continues to be true to himself, rallying around his voice and around all those dark unhappy images that seem to swim in his head forever but never drowned.
No comments:
Post a Comment