Good News for People Who Love Bad News

Early in their career, Modest Mouse accomplished what may be the ultimate goal of any band: to forge a unique and recognizable sound from the most basic elements of rock music. By the time they'd released their second album, The Lonesome Crowded West, the band was working with a distinct but manipulable set of characteristic traits-- Isaac Brock's throaty, lisping vocals, Eric Judy's rolling, fluid basslines, and the rigid, muscular drumming of Jeremiah Green. 2000's The Moon & Antarctica crafted these traits into an epic studio masterpiece-- an ambitious, affecting, moody album that built upon the band's musical strengths rather than obfuscating them. But in the wake of that record, the band's future seemed dubious. Under the pressure of following their defining LP, the band lost their drummer and regained original guitarist Dan Gallucci, a substantial lineup shift that seemed to constitute a threat to the very core of Modest Mouse's characteristic sound.

In the wake of all this uncertainty, it comes as no small relief that Good News for People Who Love Bad News is just the kind of Modest Mouse record we've come to expect from the band. As suggested by the familiar starburst pattern on the CD, now stained a pharmaceutical pink, Good News is less a product of the ambitious experimentation of The Moon & Antarctica than it is the young, violent Modest Mouse on anti-depressants. Opener "The World at Large" is classic Modest Mouse in composition-- Isaac Brock singing a melody of thirds over subtle chord changes and clean, delay-soaked electric guitar. But the overall tone of the song is disarmingly anesthetic: The jabbing guitars and insistent drumming of early Modest Mouse are ostensibly absent, replaced with subtle e-bowed guitars and distant "bop bop bop's." Certainly, "The World at Large" is more resigned in tone and content than any Modest Mouse song to date, but what makes it truly striking is that its resignation never seems fully convincing -- the frantic anxiety of early Modest Mouse still lurks just below the surface.

"The World at Large" is followed by the first single from Good News, the awe-inspiring "Float On". Like The Moon & Antarctica's "Paper Thin Walls", this song seems fundamentally different from almost everything Modest Mouse has released to date. In the past, even the band's upbeat songs have essentially been sped-up dirges, due in no small part to former drummer Jeremiah Green's restless, serpentine drum patterns. On "Float On", new drummer Benjamin Weikel more than pulls his weight, his simple but inventive playing affording the song an anthemic character never before realized by the band. This anthemic side of "Float On" reaches its apex in the song's fist-pumping finale, as numerous voices join in to sing/speak the chorus.

Like every other Modest Mouse full-length, Good News remains tremendously strong for its first five or six tracks. "Ocean Breathes Salty" is slightly darker than "Float On", but remains uncharacteristically upbeat. Here, Weikel's drumming proves particularly indispensable, his tight, regular playing adding extra emphasis to the song's powerful dynamics changes. Lyrically, as with most resignation-themed albums by philosophically minded bands, Good News concerns itself largely with death and the afterlife. At times, Brock's lyrics threaten to approach cliché, but "Ocean Breathes Salty" redeems itself with its strong vocal melodies and convincing delivery. "Bury Me With It", the record's most blistering, forceful track, is an energetic high point, putting Brock's signature sing-screaming to great use.

With "Dance Hall", however, Good News begins to slip. Along with "The Devil's Workday" and a few others, the song comes across as half-hearted Tom Waits pastiche, overlooking all of the band's strengths and ultimately undermining the album's cohesiveness. It's a shame that so many of the album's darker tracks, which could have provided a poignant emotional counterpart to the more resigned and optimistic tone of the record as a whole, come across as so overdetermined and musically lacking.

Fortunately, Good News bounces back fast with the laidback, literate "Bukowski". Here, as with "The World at Large", Brock steps out of his well-cultivated gas station savant pose to prove that, yes, he can read. Indeed, Good News is a much more lyrically casual and upfront album than any past Modest Mouse record, substituting more conversational and direct observations for Brock's usual wide-eyed, poetic revelations. Similarly, songs like "Bukowski" are much more musically unassuming, relying upon simple but well-structured banjo figures and rhythmic vocal patterns.

The latter part of Good News is host to some remarkable moments, as well. "Blame It on the Tetons" splits the difference between "Bukowski" and "The World at Large", offering one of the album's most memorable melodies. On "Black Cadillacs", Modest Mouse wind up sounding uncannily like The Clash, Brock's chorus of "we were done, done, done with all the fuck, fuck, fucking around" echoed by angular stabs of guitar, bass, and drums.

Yet, for all its transcendent moments, Good News ultimately fails to hold together all that well as an album. The middle sections of The Moon & Antarctica, often criticized for being aimless and overproduced, worked tremendously well towards reinforcing the desolate, paranoid tone of the record as a whole. Indeed, The Moon & Antarctica was an album where moment-to-moment action was often, and wisely, sacrificed for album-unifying ambience. On Good News, however, the lulls are simply lulls.

Still, it's remarkable that, after four long full-lengths, an album's worth of singles, and a couple of EPs, Modest Mouse are still finding ways to invigorate their sound while retaining a sense of definiteness and sincerity. While Good News is neither a unilateral return to the scruffier Modest Mouse of yore, or an even more experimental expansion of The Moon & Antarctica, it is host to more than its share of great-- and, perhaps more importantly, distinctively great-- moments. In spite of a substantial line-up change and the daunting spectre of their previous full-length, Modest Mouse have issued yet another record that uniquely explores what the band does best; being Modest Mouse.