2. MODEST MOUSE – The Lonesome Crowded West
Up Records, 1997
Critics have proclaimed 2000’s The Moon and Antarctica to be the band’s finest hour, but too often that album loses footing amidst gratuitous studio trickery and singer Isaac Brock’s pseudo-existential ramblings. The Lonesome Crowded West is a lean record; not in length (over 70 minutes), but in the fact that there ain’t no goddamn fat on these bones. Brock and co. (this is before that guy from the Smiths joined the band, mind you) hit all the right notes, and some of the wrong ones, but even those are right one way or another. Many have called this a perfect driving album, and they’re right, but the driving evoked here is not the standard road-trip-with-buddies fare. No, this is the soundtrack to a mad escape, from point A to point who-the-fuck-knows-where, a frenzied run from the law maybe, or from someone or something who wants you d-e-a-d dead and you don’t know why, or maybe and probably after all the only thing you’re running from is your own damn self.
DOWNLOAD: Modest Mouse - "Doin' the Cockroach"
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