Modest Mouse - An Eraser and a Maze

I've seen a lot of people say they don't "get" the new Modest Mouse album An Eraser and a Maze, so i spent way too much money just to say there's nothing to "get."

Seriously, I don't get what they're all so crazy about. You tune in for Isaac Brock's impression of Bobcat Golthwait's Sylvester the Cat impression, and you stay for the absolute insanity that ensues.

I suppose it helps to know you're listening to klangfarben style noise counterpoint; music by colors, everybody playing super-catchy melodies that somehow just work together. It also helps to know you're going to get 700 songs with 3 intermissions and no clue how we got from the start to the finish. 

Modest Mouse, forgive me for being contrary, is a Folk band playing Indie Rock like they only have a vague understanding of either genre, and they don't write songs for people to like, they write songs for people to hear. If you absolutely have to compare them to another band, counterintuitively it would have to be Old Crow Medicine Show; this isn't your world, your reality, your depression, your grief, this is the inside of Isaac Brock's brain and I can't mention it enough, his house is filled with taxidermied animals because he thinks they're a real conversation starter. 

The concept is erasing the path you already followed back to some other starting point. You do you with the pseudo-psycho musicology, i'm more than familiar with playing hide and seek with an anthoppmorphic skeleton waering a top hat inside the endlessly forking neural pathways of my own brain chemistry, but i'm not convinced it actually takes one to know one.

Don't misunderstand me, if you don't like this then you just don't. There's no secret, no magic "oh, now it makes sense" moment anyone is hiding from you, the first record ends "i guess this is as far a we go." 

I of course personally don't like having to hold the runout at just the right angle to read what side i'm looking at in the glare of my cheap fluorescent lights, but as a record you can listen to it's absolutely lovely. I like this, it makes me feel good to listen to it, it sounds like a real weird human made it, and i'm a real weird human who likes it. 

I suppose you could notice this album doesn't have much in the way of Isaac Brock playing guitar the way he does, but he didn't think he needed to masturbate all over these perfectly lovely songs, and i wholeheartedly agree. We're rewinding and going a different direction, and Song About Nothing hits right where it's supposed to. 

If anything, the album is actually too short. I never say things like that, so look how far we haven't come. 

I mean really, if quantized arpeggios and auto tuned choruses are your thing, then this isn't that, but if you're willing to dream about all of those impossible Sunday's, this might be one of the easiest Modest Mouse albums to choke down for hangover breakfast on a Monday you do wake up and try to navigate.