MODEST MOUSE NOT READY TO CLOSE ‘GOLDEN CASKET’
Modest Mouse, headlining White Oak Music Hall Oct. 8 with Future Islands, turns 30 next year.
Plenty of bands have stuck around that long. But consider R.E.M. — a standard bearer for indie rock purveyors going through phases and changes that thrill, beguile and confuse fans — was 30 when the band called it quits with a fairly great record much of its base didn’t deserve. The point being, keeping a band going in a way that maintains listeners and kindles the muse is a loser’s bet because fans are differently fussy than artists’ muses. A few bands get away with it.
With that in mind, consider “The Golden Casket,” a new record from Washington state’s Modest Mouse, the band that made a regional racket upon its arrival in the mid-1990s, created some national renown and enjoyed formidable success with hit songs and all manner of other markers for doing well.
Whether or not these superficial markers matter to singer, songwriter, guitarist and founder Isaac Brock, one of two constants during those almost 30 years, doesn’t matter. He does what he’s always done, with some variations in the presentation: write songs with fluctuating anxiety and hope about our shaky present and our more dubious future, with an eye toward how temporary structures (say, shopping malls) represent some impermanent fluidity of our dayto-day being. “I didn’t move to the city,” sang the guy who coined the album title “The Lonesome Crowded West.” “The city moved to me.”
Brock has long acted like a demographer without numbers. “The malls are the soon-to-be ghost towns,” he sang back in 1997. So years later, we’ve lived down to his dystopic future. What’s next?
“The Golden Casket.” The album isn’t the guitar-free recording Brock initially envisioned. But it’s a wondrously confounding electronics-steered set of songs that continues to pull from the hope/anxiety buckets, but perhaps the proportions have changed.
One new song, “Transmitting Receiving” feels like a wary inventory of liminal technological things we think are important. “Lace Your Shoes” is its counterweight, a fairly sincere song about his two young children.
“Part of me struggled with putting something so unabashedly optimistic,” Brock says in a phone interview. “Even writing that during a pandemic felt that way. It was in this chunk of time where I intentionally gravitated toward the dark side. So I had to ask myself, ‘Do you deserve this? Does this song feel OK?’ ”
He considered the Beatles’ “Getting Better” with its caveat: “It can’t get no worse.”
“That’s relatable, no matter what (expletive) mood you’re in,” he says. “But you start to feel self-conscious about it. Do you let something own your happiness or optimism? I wanted to project something that didn’t only have a dark side.
“I have two little people who came along in the past two years. Even if you don’t have solutions, you have to suggest they exist.”
So true to its title, “The Golden Casket” is a box with funereal connotations and also a weird gilded brightness.
As one wired for anxiety, I get a mantra in the new “Japanese Tree”: “When can we leave?”
Brock, I believe, designed it to be less about individual social commitments and more about the ways our technology tracks and reveals us in ways beyond our immediate pronouncements.
“It’s pretty (expletive) insidious,” he says. “And I don’t know that it will improve. Basically, we’re updating phones with the same bugs. And we’re stuck in this thing we think is an aesthetic.”
Which places “The Golden Casket” between hope and … not despair, necessarily, but a jittery quality about how we go about our day to day. Which makes it a different sounding, perhaps, but a very topical Modest Mouse record aligned with its predecessors.
The guy who years ago sang, “I want out desperately,” and also sang, “I don’t want you to be alone down there,” is singing the same themes with years of living that have bent the sentiments in a different way.
“You’re not wrong,” he sings on “The Sun Hasn’t Left,” “Things are a mess.”
They are. So the album feels like a song about our present. And for all the attention to the lag between Modest Mouse albums — this one follows its predecessor by six years — he doesn’t spend all that time crafting a follow-up. He says “Casket” was the result of a focused year.
And he follows those lines about how things are a mess with another line that offers some light that lingers: “But there’s still something left.”