Modest Mouse’s seventh studio album The Golden Casket mashes the band’s radio-friendly and downright weird sides together, to say the least.
If you look back at Modest Mouse’s 25 years in music, you might get a sense that there are two “sides” to the band. The first is the accessible Modest Mouse you could put on in the car with your parents, the one that gave us songs like “3rd Planet” from The Moon & Antarctica and their mega-hit “Float On” from Good News for People Who Love Bad News. The other is the weirder Modest Mouse, the one that gave us the 11-minute “Trucker Atlas” from their seminal masterpiece The Lonesome Crowded West and tracks like “March Into the Sea” from We Were Dead Before the Ship Even Sank.
Modest Mouse’s seventh studio album The Golden Casket mashes these two sides together, to say the least. Like a car trip that makes a series of sudden abrupt turns, the album switches from their most radio-friendly tracks to their most bizarre without warning. Taken piecemeal, there’s some brilliance here, but it’s chaotic enough to leave you dizzy otherwise.
If you’ve listened to an indie or alternative radio station/Spotify in the last year, there’s a good chance you’ve heard The Golden Casket’s lead single “We Are Between.” The first thing I noticed about this song was how conventional it sounded for Modest Mouse. Singer Isaac Brock, known for his iconic and eccentric vocal delivery, spouts anthemic lyrics (“We are between, we are between, yeah we are”) in a fairly straightforward manner, and the dramatic pauses at the end make it sound like prime stadium rock. It’s innocuous enough that I always appreciated hearing it, but never really sought it out later.
The album’s other two singles are in a similar vein. The aptly named “The Sun Hasn’t Left” has a bright, whimsical feel, with horns and a stomp-like beat punctuating what sounds like a marimba driving the melody. Lyrically, it has the same optimistic message as past hits “Float On” and “Dashboard,” with lines like “Not everything is going to be the best, but there’s still something left,” and is arguably the most upbeat of the three. It’s cute, but also something they’ve done before. “Leave a Light On” has sparse verses and a highly repetitive chorus of “we’re leaving, we’ll be home soon.” It has the occasional ear-catching lyric (“My friend’s house is full of very, very helpful nurses/Some days they have birthdays there and some days they have hearses”) but is otherwise a forgettable half-hearted attempt at a pop song. Outside the singles, “We’re Lucky” comes on the heels of “We Are Between” and functions almost like a coda to it. It’s just as conventional, and even repeats the line “These are the places that we’re lucky just to be between.” These parts of The Golden Casket once again demonstrate Modest Mouse’s ability to play to a big audience, but it’s hard to imagine any long-standing fans embracing them.
Now let’s get to the good part. There are plenty of parts of The Golden Casket that made me think “what the hell am I listening to?”, but in the best way possible. The album opens with a track called “Fuck Your Acid Trip” where Brock grumbles in a sinister tone over a guitar with a tremolo effect that sounds like the Smith’s “How Soon Is Now?” However, just as you start getting used to this strange atmosphere and Brock threatens, “fuck your acid trip I need to go now,” the song totally switches gear to acoustic strumming and Brock merrily singing “figure it out, just figure it out.” It’s an incredible start to the album. “Wooden Soldiers” sounds like a cross between “Tiny Cities Made of Ashes” from The Moon & Antarctica and Brock’s 2002 side project Ugly Casanova. If I had to describe its sound, I’d say “psychedelic cowboy western” seems fair, and it ranges from spiteful (“These fuckers wanted guilt, they tore me down and I rebuilt”) to sincere (“you just being here being you’s enough for me”). “Transmitting Receiving” follows, a track Brock described as getting “into the tin-foil hat.” Here, he nonsensically rattles off a long list of natural and manmade objects (“Blinds, struts, beaks, shocks, tornados, crockpots, kumquats”) in a deadpan baritone, with a separate track singing the melody (“nothing in this world’s gonna petrify me”). I’m not quite sure what it all means, and it does drag a bit, but it’s definitely the boldest step the band have made into embracing their experimental side in a long, long time.
If you only listened to these unconventional songs, you would probably think “wow, Modest Mouse really went ‘out there’ with this one!” However, if you only listened to the singles, you would probably think Modest Mouse were trying their hand at making a pop-rock album. The fact that both of these statements are true shows the scattershot nature of The Golden Casket, and the awkward flow of its tracks really hammers this in. “We Are Between” and “We’re Lucky” go hand-in-hand, but this easy-listening couplet follows the unpredictable (but fun!) “Fuck Your Acid Trip.” The paranoid “Transmitting Receiving” leads into the cheerful “The Sun Hasn’t Left,” and a sweet, tender (albeit overly long) song about parenthood called “Lace Your Shoes” arrives on its heels to create a double feature of optimism. How does The Golden Casket follow such a heartfelt moment? With an abrasive track called “Never Fuck a Spider on the Fly,” which is peak weird Modest Mouse.
Shortly before The Golden Casket was released, Uproxx published an article where Isaac Brock commented on all of Modest Mouse’s studio albums. It’s rambling and doesn’t tell all that much about the music, but it does highlight his idiosyncratic personality. This might explain why The Golden Casket is structured the way it is – it all makes sense in his head. For the rest of us, the album is either decent pop or brilliant experiments, but mostly a perplexing mix of the two.
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