Despite critical plaudits it didn’t quite live up to Epic’s ambitions for the Mouse to dent the mainstream, peaking at #120 on the Billboard chart.Īfter Brock’s aforementioned string of hardships, the writing process for Modest Mouse’s fourth studio album began in 2003. Signing to the Sony-owned Epic Records in 2000, Brock took pride in their major label debut The Moon & Antarctica, which sought to juggle both their shabby ethos with some cleaner, considered production from Brian Deck. The proudly independent, lo-fi troupe’s word-of-mouth reputation drew the interest of the majors. Though his presence at this stage was merely in the capacity of a guest musician, Gallucci’s twinkling arpeggios and spine-tingling leads on Trailer Trash served as a premonition of a warmer sounding musical universe to come.īy the turn of the 21st century, the band had amassed a fairly gargantuan repertoire, great renown for putting on unpredictable live shows and a swelling underground fanbase. Galllucci, a fellow native of the Pacific Northwest (and lead axe man in The Murder City Devils), had become acquainted with the trio, and was keen to assist with the bolstering of their sound. It was a promising, if jittery, opening statement.Īfter a scattershot spray of EPs, second album proper The Lonesome Crowded West marked the first appearance of guitarist Dann Gallucci.
A tight articulation of Brock’s wanderlust, Long Drive… also revealed Modest Mouse’s peculiar musical talents, with Judy and Green’s eccentric off-kilter rhythm section sustaining Brock’s oddball guitar approach, which frequently veered into the discordant. It was a bookish band-name that doffed its cap to Virginia Woolf, and her depiction of the working class in The Mark on the Wall as “modest mouse-coloured people, who believe genuinely that they dislike to hear their own praises”.ĭebut LP This Is a Long Drive for Someone with Nothing to Think About was released on the Seattle based independent Up Records in 1996. This first flowered when the three teens cobbled together the early line-up of Modest Mouse.
A meandering childhood of near-constant re-locating between hippie communes, the churches of a hardline Christian sect and eventually, a brief tenancy in the flooded former home of his mother, had instilled in Brock both a precocious wisdom, and a bewitchment with rural Americana – as well as a manic creative energy. Brock’s early home life was the definition of impoverished.
The seeds of the band first formed when the 16-year-old Isaac Brock met future bassist Eric Judy and drummer Jeremiah Green while hanging around the grunge-dominated music scene of Seattle in 1993. Modest Mouse’s fourth album was a spirit-lifting listen.īrock was no stranger to the titular ‘bad news’, and the group had already dealt with their fair share of swerves. Arranged with nuanced gradations of intricate guitar melodies, inebriated rhythms and macabre jazzy undertones, decked out in the backwoods-folk apparel of banjos, stand-up basses and tin whistles.
Across 16 tracks, Brock balanced epic-sized pleas for certainty ( Float On, One Chance) with darker hued, ramshackle dives into agonised swamps of mania ( The Devil’s Workday, Bury Me With It). Released on April 6th 2004, Good News For People Who Love Bad News was a triumphant collision of flavours that raised the band’s commercial stock considerably.
MODEST MOUSE FLOAT ON SERIES
Following a series of devastating personal losses, legal issues after being charged with a DUI, a brief stay in prison and a general increasing of anxiety due to the Bush Administration’s ‘War on Terror’, Modest Mouse’s sage creative principal now faced the departure of the band’s crucial drummer Jeremiah Green. 2003 was not a good year for Isaac Brock.
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