![]() ![]() ![]() Looking back, it’s music that feels a world away from the fidgety optimism of 2004’s “Float On” or the hard-won peace of 2007’s “Fire It Up”-two highlights from the band’s more recent pop-oriented run. “We didn’t sit there and stare at a screen for fucking days, that’s for damn sure-because there wasn’t one.” The sessions, Brock says, weren’t labored. The band spent 17 days in Olympia, Washington, recording with Beat Happening’s Calvin Johnson. On “Convenient Parking,” it’s the concrete ooze of urban sprawl, drummer Jeremiah Green and bassist Eric Judy finding grooves that mimic the phlegmatic rhythms of a struggling engine, of rubber on road. On the thunderous (and prescient) seven-minute opener, “Teeth Like God’s Shoeshine,” he takes aim at malls during their mid-’90s heyday, his vocals caught in a storm of his own making, the guitars both scything and soothing in fits and spasms. “These songs, they’re just an accounting of what it was like to look out the windows of my eyes.” “I was having my opinions and shit, but by no means was I trying to reprimand civilization on any level,” he says. It was lots of driving around.” Brock-who, growing up, had bounced around between Oregon, Montana, and Washington State-was pained by what he saw through the windshield: the erasure of natural grandeur for another faceless suburb, another corporate chain, another disposable purchase or mindless good time. “Anytime anyone offered me acid or mushrooms at that point in my life, I’d go there. “I’d started taking a lot of road trips,” he says. Only a year earlier, they’d released their debut, This Is a Long Drive for Someone With Nothing to Think About, an album whose title and restless spirit would act as an obvious precursor to The Lonesome Crowded West. “Just getting our foot in the door of the world.” “Old enough to have gone to war and come back if we'd been born in a different time,” the indie rock outfit’s longtime leader, Isaac Brock, tells Apple Music two decades later. Modest Mouse were still in their early twenties when they recorded their 1997 breakthrough, just three kids from the Seattle suburbs.
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