Rock Is Alive On The Moon and Anarctica,
So Don't Get So Distressed

Text: J Noise

The Moon And Antarctica is one of those rare records that come along every so often that have not a weak spot on it to be heard. There's no mush, no sweepings from the shop floor, no fillers, no additives or preservatives, just pure quality craftsmanship. In terms of both lyrical and sonic structure...it's a perfect collection of songs, songs that spoke directly to me over the end of summer and through the crisp chill of autumn in a familiar, empathetic voice, the way that great songs that affect our lives sometimes do. "How do...how do you do? My name is you..." and Isaac Brock opens up his book of fables and it's as if he's holding up a mirror to my face. Mortality, God, the Devil, Fear, Weakness to Temptation, Ability, or Lack Thereof...many of the star themes that wrestle each other around in an infinity-fall match up in my booze-addled brain are played out through these songs, and as i listen, i feel as if i am not the only goofed up little guy on this hopelessly dumb planet. Isaac understands. All this poetic majesty (stop snickering, i'm being SERIOUS) is surrounded by the type of RAWK music i like most, gentle melodies that turn on a dime into squalls of sound that give way to shimmering harmonies, and it demands that you pay attention. This isn't the stuff that be-bops happily out of the speakers while yer cruising the sushi bar at Todai. Modest Mouse makes REAL MUSIC, as dramatic and as essential to life as the sun and the rain. Allow yerself to get caught up in their storm and you'll understand. This isn't Epic's million-fucking-unit shifter, and these songs most likely won't be backing the visuals in a Nike ad anytime soon.

NAPSTER, THE GREAT LIBERATOR

The following is one of a thousand lovely Napster stories i could tell. i call this one "How i discovered The Moon and Antarctica."

It was like this, you see...i just can't get enough weekly throwaway reading in, especially when i'm visiting a city i do not live in, so while i was in Portland early last summer, i picked up a copy of the now defunct Portland Rocket, and i remember eyeballing the "Top Ten" sales charts of indie record stores, and prominently hogging not one, but two spots was this thing called Modest Mouse, with The Moon And Antarctica sitting high atop the chart at Number One, and The Lonesome Crowded West, another great record from The Mouse done back in '97 on Up Records methinks, hovering somewhere below that. I remember thinking to myself, fleetingly, "Hmmmmm", and i also remember thinking out loud to myself, "Modest Mouse...whatta stupid name".

A week or so later i was standing on by back porch in Wisconsin, shooting bullshit in the breeze with my friend Jim about "Da Rock Scene", and he as he was telling me about a guy he bought tickets off of for a Flaming Lips show in Chicago at the Cubby Bear and Jim, he said "Hey, you were out there in the Northwest...this guy at the Lips show was telling me about this band called Modest Mouse, and i said "Christ, whatta stupid name", but he swore up and down that they're really great and they have a new record out too, and i guess they're from out that way. Have you heard of 'em?" i told Jim about the blip on 'em in The Rocket and told him i'd check for 'em on Napster. Later that day...BAM! My good ol' DSL served that shit straight up hot to my hard drive, and from there i burned a disc for me and a disc for Jim. That's how I discovered The Moon and Antarctica, and consequently fell in love with The Mouse. Now some of you must be thinking thoughts that go something like "...butbutbut how can you STEAL from a BAND that you LOVE?????" Fair enough. Here's what my Modest Mouse experience might have been like without Peer-to Peer File Sharing...

Weeks after my conversation with Jim, i find myself in an independent record store in Milwaukee...

Me to Record Store Clerk: "...they're from the Northwest, y'know, Seattle and all that..."

Clerk: (Obviously irritated because people who work in indie record shops are far more cool than you or i could ever hope to be, except for baristas (whatta name, like stewardess instead of waitress, teehee!) but not the ones who work in Starbucks or any other corporate coffee sellout chain, (Nyahhh...pffffbt!) but only those who work in the kewwwl coffee places, and if not having to deal with these obstinate little fucks isn't ENOUGH JUSTIFICATION for Napster's existence, what is?) "Soooo...the band has a name?"

Me: "It starts with an M...ummmm...Modesto Mousse?"

Clerk: "I don't think we have that..."

Me: "But that's not it, it's...they've got a really stupid name..."

Clerk: "More stupid than Modesto Mousse?"

Me: "No...yeah...uh..."

Clerk: "Look, the best i could do for you is keep an eye out for something like that, and if we can order it, we'll call you in 10 to 12 weeks, and blahblahblah..."

Most likely, without Napster, the name Modest Mouse would've passed through the space between my ears and would've disappeared without a trace. So did they lose a unit sale? Probably not. Would i have bought a ticket to see them play in Portland? Probably not. Would i be dazzling your imagination with this epic tale? Probably not. Added Napster bonus: Don't have to deal with label contacts, a form of life even lower than record store clerks and baristas. GOD BLESS NAPSTER.

FEEL THE GRUNGE

i was planning to spend the New Year's Eve weekend in Portland and my sweetie phoned me to let me know that she had scored tickets to the Modest Mouse show at Portland's Crystal Ballroom on Friday night, December 29th, the first of two shows that weekend. Weeks later, there we were, on the corner of NW 14th and Burnside, to see the band of the year at the end of the year. The Crystal Ballroom has seen it all, y'all...Ragtime bands, the menace of "Animal Dances" like the "Bunny Hug" and the "Turkey Trot", which were seen as immoral and dangerous by Portland's uptighty-whitey ruling class back before WW1 broke out. The Great Depression, Gypsy Feasts of the Dead, James Brown, freeway construction, hippies, The Fugs, and a 30-year dormancy...The Ballroom survived, and hear we were, walking up it's creaking steps up to the main floor. The first thought that entered my head as we went upstairs was "This place is older than Christ." As we ascended along the blue or green or blue-green painted walls i thought of...GRUNGE! YES! The Crystal Ballroom IS Grunge! THIS is what all of those peckerheaded rock scribes were yammering on about since back around the Advent of Nirvana! THIS IS GRUNGE! The smell of the Ballroom, like an antique shop or yer Grandma's house, well, it smell like grunge, but it's the smells of the people, yes, the PEOPLE SMELLS, that’s what really makes the grunge experience of The Ballroom complete. The smell of damp wool sweaters and the sweaty woolen headgear that every man and woman seems to wear even when the sun plays a cameo role in the daily Portland drama and pushes the temperature into the warm zone, the smell of hair...facial hair, body hair, armpit hair, this is GRUNGE! Everyone is dressed as if they've been camping along the Willamette, and they smell like it too! As i stumbled around the Ballroom, with an Absolut and tonic in my hand and 17 various cold medicines in my body, i could really FEEL THE GRUNGE, i could hear it and smell it and taste it and... ecccch!

Everyone in The Ballroom was smoking cigarettes, which i found interesting since there's enough dried wood in The Crystal to keep Serbia warm for an entire winter. Seems to me that the city fathers who write fire codes would be adverse to this, especially when you consider that this is a town where you can't even pump yer own gas, i shit you not. Pumping yer own gas is against the law. Every gas station has attendants who are specially trained to perform this arduous task for you. Sorta wish we had a law like that in Wisconsin when the wind chill is 80 fucking below zero, that would be okey-dokey, but speaking of laws, it just occurred to me that smoking may actually be required in Portland. Seriously. Coffee drinking, too. Now, i've heard more than a few Portlanders complain that their fair city's culture and character is derivative of their larger neighbor to the north, Seattle, and that's why Portland has so many coffee houses and rock clubs. i've never been to Seattle, but in Portland, if you look around, you'll notice that everything that stands still is covered with a pretty green moss. i would imagine this is because of the constant rain and lack of substantial sunlight. At any rate, if you leave yer car parked in one spot for any extended length of time, you'll be driving away a grassy knoll, so perhaps it's required of Portland resident's that they smoke upwards of a pack a day in order to keep enough toxins rolling around in the body to ward off the growth of body moss. There might some sort of Espresso-Every-Four-Hours law on the books too, y'know, because the caffeine would keep the body in a nervous, fidgety state, i dunno, but all that smoking in The Crystal had me eyeballin' the exits...one stray butt and that place is goin' up like an Aggie bonfire.

DUB NARCOTIC MOUSE IN THE HOUSE

By 9:15 pm, the Crystal Ballroom is packed and Dub Narcotic Sound System takes the stage right on time. In case you don't know, Dub Narcotic Sound System is a Calvin Johnson production, and Calvin is Papa K of, you guessed it, K Records in Olympia, WA, the label that documented the sounds of Built to Spill, Tiger Trap, Calvin's own Beat Happening and The Halo Benders, and, at one time, Modest Mouse. i've admired Calvin for years. It's a wondrous thing to operate a successful indie empire in a pastoral setting such as Olympia (Pop. 30,000+) for as long as he has. Always dug Beat Happening, loooooooved The Halo Benders "Don't Touch My Bikini", a song that only Calvin could do in that deep, deadpan croak of his. He performs like a goof, and watching him with Dub Narcotic was like watching the weirdo neighbor guy down the street with his drunk bowling buddies knock back a few big mouth bottles of Mickey's and bleat out toons for hawaiian barbeques (sans steel pedal and tiki torches) in his garage until his wife comes out in curlers and orders him to take out the trash or until a grumpy octogenarian neighbor calls the cops. Amusing, but not essential. Halfway through a ten-minute monologue about Santa and reindeer during the second number of the set, it was obvious that Calvin was there to fuck around. What a hoot.

Which brings us, finally, to The Mouse. "Did The Mouse", you might ask, "bring down the house?" Well...no. Not exactly. The guys came out and tinkered a bit under a spooky red darkroom glow with an audio doohickey that produced some strange, repetitious vibrating noise that went on for about fifteen minutes, then the band came out to play...and play they did. Played their asses off, and no talking between set numbers at all, just rock, rock, rock. The sound, as it is in all of these magnificent old caves that were built before the invention of amplified music contraptions was bad, although the engineers behind the boards did a great job of shaping the sound as best they could, but besides the cavern effect, the greatest challenge Modest Mouse faced that night was their own recorded brilliance. The guys in the band may well disagree with me, but i don't think that the songs of Modest Mouse are easily performed live. For example, one of my favorites is "Tiny Cities Made Of Ashes" from the Moon And Antarctica. i love this song because it's so ridiculous. It starts out with a fat, looping bass line and a backbeat, and before long, Isaac chimes and rhymes in a soft spoken white guy rap, recorded two or three times and short-stacked on top of each other to catch the edge of an echo. Later, following a creepy keyboard high note and that familiar ricochet twang that Isaac pulls from his strings, his cool and conversational spiel is overruled by a hurricane holler "DOES ANYBODY KNOW A WAY THAT A BODY COULD GET AWAY DOES ANYBODY KNOW A WAY?" The contrast is what makes the tune what it is, but onstage; Isaac just sorta hollered his way through the whole deal. They really attacked all of the songs like that, and some of their subtle beauty was lost as a result, but Modest Mouse, it must be told, perform with an intensity that is marvelous to behold. They FEEL this music and the power of making art that matters, not for any other reason than that they have it in them and they need to get it out, to bleed out the frustrations, hostility and uncertainty and shape it into something beautiful, something that fits under a star-filled night sky, but still can shake the anthills at their feet and rouse birds from nests high above their heads, and if they do not wring the very last hint of passion from their hearts before the night is over, they've failed the audience and themselves. i believe that Isaac Brock and Modest Mouse believe this...that's what i saw and heard in The Crystal Ballroom.

When i got back to Wisconsin, i opened up my computer and saw a headline on the MSN homepage that asked "Can U2 Save Rock?" and i laughed and laughed, and i thought of a young girl who was sitting behind me through most of the Modest Mouse set, a girl who couldn't have even been eighteen, and how irritating it was to have to hear her singing along to EVERY GODDAMN LYRIC that came flying out of Isaac’s mouth. In retrospect, she was wonderful, and boy, she could do a lot worse...she's in love with a great rock band, and as long as her and Modest Mouse have each other, hell...rock don't need no saving.

— J Noise