MODEST MOUSE The Moon & Antarctica >From the pages of the CMJ New Music Report, Issue: 670 - Jun 12, 2000 Before the band even hit the studio to record The Moon & Antarctica, Modest Mouse had a lot to answer for. The album marks the band's leap from the indie rock world to the majors, but luckily, Mouse vocalist/guitarist Isaac Brock is not a guy easily affected by such things. The Mouse's third full-length album shows no signs of artistic sell-out or forced commerciality, and continues Brock's desperate battle to understand the conundrum of loneliness in the tightly packed modern world with all the earnestness and frustration of the band's past work. Modest Mouse trademarks, such as his self-effacing honesty, remain completely intact and he comes clean with soul-baring confessions such as, "Everything that keeps me together is falling apart/I've got this thing that I consider my only art of fucking people over," and "Well it took a lot of work to be the ass that I am." As his internal mania is unleashed in the lyrics, the music is at once pop, punk, psychedelic and rootsy, filled with frantic, bending moments that coalesce into expansive interludes during which individual sounds meld into one awe-inspiring sonic motion. Though awfully neurotic, this Mouse has nothing to be modest about at all. -Kelso Jacks
