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Live Review
by SashaS
31-8-2004
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| Modest Mouse: delightfully fab, frankly |
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Live: Modest Mouse
Islington Academy, London
Monday, August 30, 2004
Modest Mouse: less modest than mighty...
Islington Academy is a fairly intimate place and it felt more comfortable with the America’s new hope. Modest Mouse are pretty big news in the States, as their newly acquired major label status three attests, but despite a healthy underground following in this country, they still languish among the lesser known of the current crops of US bands attempting to re-fertilize the withering form.
The band’s recent single ‘Float On’, a luminous song from their fourth album ‘Good News for People Who Love Bad News’, missed to capture the nation’s imagination past the airwaves. The track is in the mould of The Flaming Lips, they also helped on a cut – guesting and mixing - but the rest is tricky to categorize as it leaps between taut white funk, vagabond Tom Waits-eque swamp, old Appalachian country, some Delta blues with brass to fashion the kind of neat, glittering, raucous indie pop-rock this country used to churn out in spades, all led the rasping, beauteous-voiced Isaac Brock.
The Issaquah, WA, band’s material is a fine mixture of rock and alternative without avoiding the pop ingredient. All the ‘stories’ of MM being Sony’s Flaming Lips are greatly exaggerated due to the fact that these people are a tad more radical than the veteran cult combo. It is still more of polite experimentation - like searching how deep their excavation can go - and yet, rather a delicate proposition for youngsters ‘farmed’ on more obviously mediocre sonic diets. [By the way, when this reviewer likes something it should be a fair warning to the artiste - it is the deo-bylaw - Chief Ed.]
The band has an collegiate demeanour, Modest Mouse lack the smartass attitude that their effortlessly chameleon character might suggest, not least thanks to their love for an irrepressible melody.
‘Float On’ comes at us with its storming, blissed-out chorus, spiky riff works and pogo-ing backbeat, being the sort of tune to make an entire nation wave their hands in the air in unison… Or, at least – the civilisation’s representatives tonight.
Get into da lo-ryddim, said Battery to Envelope at the Alice’s restaurant, firing up narghileh. And, we’ll all f**k on the UK!
This Mouse is far more mighty than modest.
SashaS
31-8-2004
Modest Mouse’s album ‘Good News for People Who Love Bad News’ is available now on Epic
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