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From chekout.com (a online music/movie/video game
retailer). They usually seem to take their music section seriously, as they do
cocert reviews and lots of features and interviews an such. Anyways, their album
of the year for 1999 was Pavement's Terror Twilight, to which they gave a 9 out
of 10.
Modest Mouse - The Moon & Antarctica 10 out of 10 Just when you think so-called modern rock has hit absolute bottom, something comes along that single-handedly yanks the genre from the wallow of its own fetid by-product and offers a life-changing experience in the process. And so it goes with Modest Mouse and their unassuming little 15-track opus The Moon & Antarctica. Everything about it -- the artwork, the colors, and, of course, the music -- renders meaning where the empty spaces had been. Easily the Gen-X equivalent to Bob Dylan's Blonde on Blonde and the yang to Smashing Pumpkins' Siamese Dream yin, the enigmatic Modest Mouse quietly roars with profound, yet simple, lyrics injected with layers and layers of all manner of guitars to create moods, sculpt rhythms and turn the wheels in heart and head. For three guys from Issaquah, Washington (vocalist/guitarist Isaac Brock, bassist Eric Judy and drummer Jeremiah Green), they transmit more melodic revelations per square inch than most bands with twice as many bodies can project in their entire careers. In fact, never has the "less-is-more" adage been so spot-on. Brock's vocals assume and convey countless emotional nuances without compromising the genuine rock ethic, which underlies such diverse alignments as the alt country twang and spaceland drift of "Perfect Disguise" or the Lou Reed lilt and Pink Floyd anguish of "Alone Down There." But Brock isn't the only star around which The Moon revolves, though his acoustic and electric guitar work is never anything less than spectacularly skillful (and we're not talkin' wanking either). Judy and Green maximize the bass and drums as creators of the atmospheric rather than for their rhythmic faculties alone, as in "Gravity Rides Everything" and "The Cold Part." As interpretive and abstract as its title suggests, The Moon & Antarctica is an exploratory trip through the gray matter between your ears, insisting by way of its very eloquence and tough beauty that you actively listen and think. You'll be surprised by your own intelligence when contemplating the universal truths illuminated in searing music and words like "No one really knows the ones they love/If you knew everything they thought/I bet that you'd wish that they'd just shut up" (from "Lives") or "I'm gonna look out the window of my color TV/I wanna remember to remember to forget you forgot me" (from "A Different City"). And so it goes with the entire terrain of The Moon & Antarctica, casting shadow and light, cutting sharp and gliding smooth, highlighting the bizarre within the commonplace and underscoring the normal within the surreal. Moment for moment, there's not a more significant collection of songs to spend your life with, and it's the discovery of The Moon & Antarctica in the modern rock wasteland that makes the journey worth taking. |
