![]() The stunning closer “Styrofoam Boots / It’s All Nice On Ice, Alright” is his most acrobatic showcase. ![]() For such a short life, he leaves behind an outsized legacy: unquestionably one of the greatest drummers in indie rock history, and an inimitable part of the Lonesome Crowded West sound.Įven when he plays lightly, Green’s drums feel jarring they clatter. On December 25th, it was announced that Green had been diagnosed with stage four cancer he passed away six days later at just 45 years old. For one, Judy left Modest Mouse in 2012 and didn’t return for the occasion (though Russell Higbee did an admirable job in his place.) And at the shows I saw in late December, Green was absent, too, for tragic reasons I’d discover before the year was out. At the end of the day he was just doing his job. “There, that’s that entire fucking record,” he grinned after playing the final note in New York. Both nights, Brock was all business, no banter. I caught two shows, in Philly and New York, without any notable differences in the performance. Each night the band played the whole album front to back. That is, until the tail end of 2022, when the band threw together a month-long tour in honor of the album’s 25th anniversary. But for all that unprocessed power, these songs have been mostly absent from live shows over the years. Recorded three years later, The Lonesome Crowded West still has that dogged, youthful resolve: pour everything into this gig and then haul ass to the next one. Performing was the means and the end, the default-from house shows to local clubs to Calvin Johnson’s Dub Narcotic Studios in Olympia, where they cut their first EP as Modest Mouse in 1994. Barely old enough for their learner’s permits, Brock, Judy and Green were already a triple threat: uncommon chops, a telekinetic sense of how to play together, and the will to do it pretty much all the time. If ever a brand-new group could afford to stand alone, this three-piece was it. ![]() Determined not to be pigeonholed, Brock took a hard line: if anyone asked, Modest Mouse was an Issaquah band. But from the get-go, Modest Mouse’s sound didn’t gel with either the grunge in Seattle or Olympia’s more outré experiments. They orbited hot independent scenes in Seattle and Olympia, both thrilling places for alternative rock. ![]() In the mid-’90s, Brock, bassist Eric Judy and drummer Jeremiah Green were high-schoolers in the small town of Issaquah, Washington. These songs are never boring, even when they seem to soundtrack endurance itself (name a better driving song than “Truckers Atlas.”)įor a three-piece whose unflinching work ethic is now the stuff of legends, it’s only fitting. ![]() Brock’s lead guitar crashes and burns, lopes tenderly, incinerates again. Underneath all the image-making, there’s plenty of breathing room and more than a few screeching turns. Jones Brock gives us a brain for a burger and a heart for coal, styrofoam boots, and Cowboy Dan, a major player in the cowboy scene. Dylan gave us Mona Lisa with the highway blues, Desolation Row, and the loathsome Mr. He grafts raw emotions into caustic composites of American life-vaguely cartoonish and often sarcastic, sometimes empty and enervated, brimming with rage. But like him, Brock swings on a pendulum from listless to frenzied, head in the clouds. Brock, in a button-down with a cigarette, hints that fans can expect more of a Bob Dylan influence on the upcoming record: “I’ve been biting his style pretty good.”Īs it turned out, he overstated the case a bit The Lonesome Crowded West is no Dylan imitation. There’s a telling moment in Pitchfork’s making-of documentary-footage from a year before the album’s release. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |