WHEN a band loses a guitarist, it's often the catalyst for either meltdown or a radical rethink. Modest Mouse - who have lost and regained so many band members since their formation in America's rural northwest as to make them look either sloppy or careless - took the latter route. After the commercialsuccessoftheirlast album, 2004's Good News For People Who Love Bad News (they like long titles: their debut was called This Is A Long Drive For Someone With Nothing ToThinkAbout),guitaristDann Gallucci quit for the second time. Gallucci had been responsible for the central riff on the band's biggest hit to date, Float On, a dreamy, effervescent slice of pop that owed more than a little to Johnny Marr of The Smiths. LookingtoreplaceGallucci,Isaac Brock - the band's singer and principal songwriter, and about the only constant in Modest Mouse's 14-year career - had a novel idea: why not go to the source, and ask Marr himself?
The year marks the 20th anniversary of The Smiths' bitter break-up. The Morrissey/Marr songwriting partnership that had proved so mercurial and fruitful for five years was torn asunder by Marr's increasing frustration at Morrissey's behaviour. (Marr, long after the split, once commented that he'd spend days perfecting a beautiful, ringing riff, and Morrissey would pair it up with a line more suited to music hall.) Side projects - Electronic, the ill-fated Healers - came and went, and Marr spent most of the 1990s as an in-demand session player. At a loose end in2006,whenBrocktrackedhim down, Marr thought "why not?"
Modest Mouse may currently be a little-known presence in the UK, but across the Atlantic they're serious business indeed: one of a raft of indie bands to have infiltrated the mainstream thanks to intelligent, literate ideas (their name comes from a line in a Virginia Woolf story), and niggling, catchytunes,nottomentionwell-placedendorsementsonTVshow soundtracks.
For a band who deal in sparky, wayward melodies, capable of veering from reggae-tinged post-punk to sea shanties to full-on pop, the addition of someone like Marr makes sense, and his full integration into the band - he started as a contributing songwriter for this album, but has now declared he's a full-time member - adds a further sheen to the Modest Mouse's already broad sound.
IsaacBrock'svocalscanbean acquired taste; like Arcade Fire's Win Butler, he can sometimes sound rather shrill. But what first draws you in to this album is the sheer abundance of melodies buzzing past like hummingbirds: chiming glockenspiels come and go while guitar lines circle back on themselves. There are echoes of The Fall, Yo La Tengo, The Clash, the more focused end of Sonic Youth, Orange Juice and, yes, The Smiths. Listening to We Were Dead Before The Ship Even Sank, you can pinpoint Marr's contributions: he's there in the choppy white funk of We've Got Everything, whichcouldbeFranzFerdinand fronted by a frustrated Anglophile; and in the album's first single, Dashboard, in which Marr's riff dances around horn-blasts.
There are moments when the guitars bristle, but for the most part onthisalbum,whichfeelsalittlelonger than you want it to be, they hold the songs together, and keep Brock and Marr's more esoteric moments from disintegrating into formlessness.
Towards the end comes Spitting Venom, the album's longest track. It starts with a jaunty, two-note acoustic guitar and Brock musing about someone who's been "spitting venom at most everyone you know", then turns on a sixpence to become a sleazy, loping grind, with enough venom of its own, before the original motif reappears, this time to be drawn out into a coda of echoing guitar notes and a lone, almost mariachi-style trumpet.
In an album full of odd twists and turns, not least of which is the identity of its lead guitarist, it's one of the best: beautiful and strange and capable of drawing you in. Modest Mouse had their charms before, but with the addition of their newest member, who is making better music than he has done in almost two decades, they've suddenly shifted up a gear.
Recommended download: Spitting Venom
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