Modest Mouse - We Were Dead Before the Ship Even Sank Review [2]
Posted by Danielle Ricci on 03.24.2007
Avast! Prepare for some nautical bedlam with the once and future kings of rock’s underground.
A couple years ago, I saw Modest Mouse in Boston with my good friend Keith, a veteran of some bakers’ dozen of the band’s shows. In the ear-ringing comedown following the first set, he likened what we had just experienced to the 50s prom scene from the first Back to the Future when Marty McFly plays “Johnny B. Goode” to a stunned crowd too far back on the musical timeline to comprehend what they were hearing. “I don’t know what it is,” he concluded, “but it’s awesome.”
Keith’s analogy is dead on. There’s a lot about this band’s sound that I will never understand, but that might just contribute to the awe. We Were Dead Before the Ship Even Sank is a baffling, but truly wonderful ride. At times Isaac Brock’s sings like he’s throwing punches only to turn his vocals suddenly sweet and introspective; beautifully catchy hooks emerge from seething chaos; the nautical theme around which the album is built rears up into acoustic mayhem and fades into charming, clean pop. Like true artists, this band is surprising and unpredictable but always entertaining. Modest Mouse bottles insanity like no other band making music today.
(photo: modestmouse.com)
We Were Dead Before the Ship Even Sank, the band’s fifth full-length studio release and their first with former Smiths guitarist Johnny Marr, comes at an interesting juncture in this band’s evolution. Their last album, Good News for People Who Love Bad News, left in its wake a divided fan base. The band scored their first major single with the eminently radio-friendly “Float On,” and with it a barrage of new fans oblivious to the band’s previous work. Many of the diehard supporters who’d been behind this band during all the years they toiled in obscurity were upset to discover their band on the radio playing for the masses and their shows packed with pre-teen emissaries from the Good Charlotte set. We Were Dead Before the Ship Even Sank, provides a suitable middle ground for both camps of Modest Mouse enthusiasts. It harkens back to dense, irregular sound the pre-fame days of the Mouse, while holding on to some of the accessibility and polish that made their last effort such a mainstream success. The album balances radio-ready singles with classic Modest Mouse bursts of artistic sonic freakout. There is something for you here, whether you’ve been devoted to this band forever, or discovered them in the great media blitz of 2004.
Track List:
1. "March into the Sea" – 3:30
2. "Dashboard" – 4:08
3. "Fire It Up" – 4:36
4. "Florida" – 2:59
5. "Parting of the Sensory" – 5:36
6. "Missed the Boat" – 4:26
7. "We've Got Everything" – 3:42
8. "Fly Trapped in a Jar" – 4:31
9. "Education" – 3:58
10. "Little Motel" – 4:46
11. "Steam Engenius" – 4:28
12. "Spitting Venom" – 8:29
13. "People as Places as People" – 3:44
14. "Invisible" – 4:01
Here’s a recap of a few of the album’s high points:
We Were Dead Before the Ship Even Sank comes out swinging with “March into the Sea,” a full boar sea shanty (blame it on the popularity of International Talk Like a Pirate Day, but I feel like sea shanties are the new power ballads, everyone’s doing it), full of maniacal belly-laughing, bells and accordions and a drunken, swaggering tempo. From there, the album leaps straight into the first single, “Dashboard,” which has already hit number five on the Billboard Modern Rock chart. The track is fresh and plucky, but still quirky – perfect road trip music.
“Florida” is the first of three tracks (the others being "Missed the Boat" and "We've Got Everything") with backing vocals provided Shins frontman, James Mercer. The track is fairly polished, with a strong hook that glues together schizophrenic verses that jump between angry and carefree. I’d say it’s a fair bet for third single if the album gets to that many.
For all the million times that this band has written about death, they always keep it interesting. “Parting of the Sensory” begins as a quiet, introspective track in the vein of “Ocean Breaths Salty,” and devolves into something like a perverse folk dance - replete with fiddling, stomping and clapping - around the feverish repetition of “some day you will die and somehow something’s going to steal your carbon.” It keeps the pirate-aesthetic alive without crossing over into hokey.
“We’ve Got Everything” has the kind of energy and feel you might expect to find behind that montage moment in an 80s movie where the protagonist does all the work to turn their life around. Boisterous and expansive, the track is a likely choice for second single. The music captures all the joy you’d expect from a summer anthem while the lyrics tell a decidedly hairier story of death and giving up. It’s intensely infectious.
“Little Motel” is a sweet, quiet, rolling landscape of a track – a nice reprieve before the album gears back up again with “Steam Engenius.” Of all the tracks on this album, “Steam Engenius” reminds me most of early Modest Mouse. It throws off some of the neatness of the rest of the release and finds Brock spitting out distorted rapid-fire descriptions of absurd scenes like “I held in my hand the beating heart of a robot.”
The 411: We Were Dead Before the Ship Even Sank is artful, and it’s tight - there’s nothing extraneous here, no throw-away tracks. It’s got the catchy singles to lure you in and madcap, lush album cuts to luxuriate in - classic Modest Mouse with a bit of polish. Captivating.
