(I lost formatting in posting this on Blogger. But it's a response to Amy's friend John, who told me I was stupid and didn't know good music last night. I just need a place to put it real quick.)

Explanatory Preamble
The beginning of this here is my explanation of my thought process when I get a new record from a band I already like. Because I’m already a fan, there’s all sorts of expectations and things to live up to. So, here’s what I demand of new records by bands I like.

You have two options: 1. Do something new. I don’t care what it is. You want to ditch your guitars for Theremins and drum loops? That’s fine, as long as you do something interesting and gutsy with it, something I didn’t expect. 2. If you don’t feel like innovating because you have more to say in the manner of your older stuff, that’s fine, too. But in that case, you had better write a bunch of really solid songs—don’t just repeat everything you’ve already said. Don’t just repeat everything you already said. It’s annoying. We’ll call option one The New Direction Album and we’ll call #2 The Brick Shithouse Album.

Now, Why I’m Especially Skeptical of Good News
I’m not just being a hater here—I like the new modest mouse record. When it comes down to it, it’s definitely better than several of the other records I’ve purchased this month. It’s possible that this is a really good album, but let me tell you: it takes time to determine that sort of thing. Unless what I hear knocks me on my ass on the first listen (Neutral Milk Hotel’s In the Aeroplane over the Sea, Elliott Smith’s XO, Ben Folds Five, that kind of thing.), I won’t say an album is great until I’ve heard it a lot. Because, man, the truth is, I haven’t figured out a better method of figuring out which albums really stand out from the others until I’ve lived with them for a while. Because in a really great record, there are frequently songs that don’t strike you as great the first time you hear them. They have to get under your skin and grow on you, and then one day you realize that while That One Great Song at the beginning of the record drew you in originally, you’re really attached to The Sleeper-Hit Buried at Track 11 that you didn’t hear until your fiftieth listen. There are at least a dozen things that make your fiftieth listen more indicative of the real record than your first.

So, why else can’t I decide if Good News qualifies as A New Direction or A Brick Shithouse? Good question. But here’s why: through most of their catalogue, Modest Mouse have not been an “album” band. They’ve been a “song” band. That is, they could make an 80 minute album in the late 90’s, and all I’d really care to hear off of it were a handful of five-minute moments I really liked (Do The Cockroach, for example). Most of their shining-est moments in my opinion happened on Building Nothing out of Something, which is just a collection of songs. But man, at that time, stuff like “All Night Diner” sounded like nothing else—loud, thumping, weird, almost subversive rock music. Again, note, though, the whole record wasn’t that great. At least we can point to Good News as an album with some good songs, but…I’m really cautious about calling it an album as good as the last one.

To make an album—an entirely cohesive and affecting one—is what I think most bands are trying to create: an hour of artistic vision that sticks together and owns a room when you put it on. And Modest Mouse finally did that with The Moon and Antarctica. It even had some of those Sleeper Hits I was talking about.

Bands tend to freak out after they make those defining albums. I’ll give you three reasons why (for the sake of base covering).

1. Because, well, your average band isn’t going to make more than two of them. Hell, “average” bands never make one. I’ve hardly seen anybody make more than two.

2. When a band makes one of these, there’s usually a period beforehand where they made a lesser record or two, all the while working out the ideas for that new masterpiece. Making the masterpiece leaves you standing on this edge where, if you want to keep innovating and stay afloat, you’re going to have to make a New Directions album, and that’s scary. You’re also admitting, by virtue of admitting you’re at the end of an era and need to change directions, that your next record has overwhelming potential to be one of those Creative Missteps Where You Fall Flat On Your Face.

3. The pressure of The Follow Up: A Brick Shithouse is always going to look like a teepee after the masterpiece album, so some innovation is in order. But even if you innovate, even if you do so a lot, the New Direction is going to get compared unmercifully to The Masterpiece. Of course some comparison would be in order, but people have a way of getting their panties in a bunch with expectations and, for some reason, the failiure to realize that every album logistically almost can’t be the new best record.

My conclusion and dispelling of novelty
So, here we are. I don’t know what to think of Modest Mouse’s follow up. “But Brian!” you say, “there’s boatloads of innovation here: listen to the horns! Listen to the banjo! What the hell are you talking about?! Modest Mouse wouldn’t have stood next to The Flaming Lips at a party in 2000!” Okay, fair enough. But not true, not true.

This album would look like a lot of innovation and take a lot more digesting for me if it wasn’t for Ugly Casanova. In the years after The Moon and Antarctica came out, Issac Brock made this band with guys from Red Red Meat and other bands (Brian Deck, I just like him more and more these days). Sharpen Your Teeth, their first (and, probably, only) record was great. Really great. Some of it sounds like The Moon and Antarctica (Barnacles) but some of it sounds like the “innovation” on Good News was just getting tested out here in the safety of an indie side project.

Also, some of this is admittedly poor placement or songwriting: “The World At Large” is a good song, but a crappy opening track. It’d fit better somewhere else. Dancehall is pretty much a crappy song. So, let me be an asshole and dissect the new sounding stuff (which I like, but I promise it’s about to sound like I hated this record). The real best stuff on the record is the second half. But look at it closely: it all came from other sources. Bukowski sounds like it belonged on the Ugly Casanova record, The View sounds like a (good, but nonetheless) regular old Modest Mouse song. “The Good Times are Killing Me” is at best a less-manic cousin of “Things I don’t Remember,” the closing track of Sharpen Your Teeth. “The Devil’s Workday” is one of the most Tom Waits-esque songs I’ve ever heard. Unfortuately, nothing sets it apart as a Modest Mouse song. It sounds like a cover from Tom’s Blood Money. So I have to object a little. The Rip-Off is obvious. (If you’ve never heard Blood Money and you like “The Devil’s Workday,” let me know. I’ll set you up with some good Waits. Tom Waits is a Genius with between three and six Masterpiece albums, as ridiculous as that sounds.) It’s funny, because even the interlude on the second half sounds like an “Alice” era Tom Waits demo. It’s tough for bands to do heavy pump organ on their records, because Tom rides that thing. Especially in his at-home demos.

There are genuinely new and brilliant moments on this record, too, but since you insist on debating me about everything and talking shit about every record I like, I’ll stop here and let you figure out what’s so good about any of it. I just wanted you to know why I had reason to doubt whether it was better than The Moon and Antarctica.