20 Years of Good News for People Who Love Bad News by Modest Mouse
A retrospective of the album that took Modest Mouse to the big leagues.
Twenty years of good news…or is it bad news? Who can say? Regardless, twenty years is a good long while and a lot of things can change. Despite all this you can still count on a little band called Modest Mouse rolling into town every year or two.
Though their recording output has slowed down significantly, averaging about one album every five years, Modest Mouse has arguably never been more active — at least as a live band. After all, Modest Mouse shows are consistent sellers. The quality of these shows is debatable but you can expect to hear some catchy indie tunes from your youth if you pay the price of admission.
Good for those guys! They really deserve it. Things weren’t always that way so it’s important to ask just how they got to this point. Let’s turn that clock back 20(!) years to 2004. Bush is in office. Green Day isn’t happy about it. Kids are shooting at the buses and the cars in Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. An era that is distinctly modern but feels impossibly alien at the same time.
It was in April of 2004 that Modest Mouse released their commercial breakthrough Goods New For People Who Love Bad News. By this point the band, fronted by songwriter Isaac Brock, had been chugging along in relative obscurity for roughly ten years. When they weren’t in the studio they were on the road guided only by a trucker’s atlas and their own ambition.
In these early years Modest Mouse was a raucous mix between DC post-hardcore, Built to Spill pop, and Neil Young twang. The music was immediate. It demanded the attention of any lost soul whose college roommate popped the CD into their boombox. Word of mouth and an incessant touring schedule helped Modest Mouse bolster a positive reputation in the underground. You wouldn’t catch them on commercial FM radio (yet) but your local campus DJ was sure to keep a few tracks in rotation.
With the release of 1997’s The Lonesome Crowded West, Modest Mouse were looked upon as indie darlings. Critically revered with authentic chops to back it all up. Unsurprisingly, major labels took notice and Modest Mouse soon signed with Epic Records.
In 2000, their first major label effort, The Moon & Antarctica was released to critical acclaim and modest commercial success. It seemed like the band would commercially plateau here and continue doing their thing.
When Good News released it was met with more critical acclaim but was perceived as a noticeable notch down from their previous effort. Commercially it was doing about the same. Preceding the album’s launch by a month was Float On, a bouncy and ever so quirky indie anthem that you’re more than likely very familiar with. After debuting on the Billboard Alternative Airplay charts a few days before the album release it gradually climbed the charts until reaching the number one spot in July.
After countless hours of hard work as a largely independent band, Modest Mouse had hit the big time. Ever since they’ve been regarded as a gateway into the larger alternative music sphere. But what of the rest of the album? Surely the album didn’t subsist off the success of Float On alone.
Some would say that Good News saw Modest Mouse “sell out”. Generally you don’t get a hit on the radio without polishing your sound to some extent. This is true in this case as well but that doesn’t mean the album is without merit. Far from it. Good News is seen as a classic of the early 2000’s era of indie where garage rock brashness and dancey post-punk stomps were heralded by cool kids all across the western hemisphere.
Even in the face of these accusations Isaac and company made a couple daring creative decisions. Cuts like This Devil’s Workday channeled the vagrant energy of Swordfishtrombones era Tom Waits. The album even begins with a bleating cacophony on horns. This clip is used once again on the previously mentioned song as a bit of a reprise.
The album works best when it embraces the weird and off kilter side of Modest Mouse. Sadly this is still the most tame Modest Mouse record even with these touches. The second half of the album drags with the unremarkable alt rock of songs like The View, One Chance or Black Cadillacs. In the years since Good News released, younger audiences have become enlightened to the band’s earlier work as a true representation of their definitive sound. The author of this piece is a prime example of such an audience.
Though it is a stylistically different piece of work, Brock’s identifiable sense of lyricism does shine through. On the album highlight, Bukowski, Brock channels the curmudgeonly attitude of the titular famous writer to take on the almighty Christian god.
Brock calls out,
“If God takes life He’s an Indian giver
So tell me now why, you’ll tell me never
Who would wanna be such a control freak?”
It’s not a far cry from previous Modest Mouse songs like Styrofoam Boots which posits that “God takes care of himself and you of you”. As it stands, Brock isn’t so easily convinced of such an almighty deity. If he does exist he surely doesn’t give a damn about us.
You would be forgiven for believing that Goods News, or that Modest Mouse by extension, would be an indie offshoot of positive hardcore based upon Float On’s decidedly optimistic lyrics.
“Bad news comes
Don’t you worry even when it lands
Good news will work its way to all them plans”
The band’s signature song was a deliberate choice to remain positive. Brock cited the Bush administration and catastrophic climate change as particular pain points of his emotional state at the time. Float On was penned to combat these feelings. Really it was just to make us, the listener, feel good. To know that no matter how bad shit got, we would all make it somehow.
These pretenses are swiftly dropped, however, as we dig deeper into the album. Album closer The Good Times Are Killing Me details the sustained drug use of Brock over the years and how it’s going to be the end of him. The good times do indeed kill if you’re not careful. Such sentiments are expressed across the record like in Bury Me With It, which suggests that it’s too late to stop. You may as well bury him with his creature comforts. He wouldn’t be able to stop either way. On the album’s second single, Ocean Breathes Salty, Brock ruminates on what comes after death. The palpable anxiety is paired with an airy jangly guitar that evokes the sound of their previous records.
In the years that followed, Modest Mouse continued down this path of alt radio friendly guitar rock. They even recruited the Smiths’ resident songsmith, Johnny Marr to make an album and tour with them. By this point, the magic that made the band unique had been replaced with something else. To reiterate a previous point, this later career period would be much more warmly received by true indieheads if it were released under a different guise. To suggest that records like Strangers to Ourselves or The Golden Casket are of the same lineage as The Lonesome Crowded West may be taken as an insult. These later records aren’t bad but the spirit that propelled the poor young boys of Modest Mouse is notably absent.
Regardless, it’s swell to see the band have carved out a niche for themselves in the greater alt rock world. They can count on fans both new and old coming to their shows every night. Such popularity affords a rare sense of stability in the modern day music industry. If you can write a song like Heart Cooks Brain, you deserve a happy life. Even if that means selling out juuust a little.
