Crossfade Reviews: Modest Mouse "The Golden Casket"

 by Karl W.

Modest Mouse "The Golden Casket"
[Epic Records]
Indie Rock/Alternative Rock/Psychedelic Rock

    I won't pretend to be non-biased in my assessment of this band. Modest Mouse has been one of my personal favorite bands since the early 2010s when I truly discovered them. The Washington based band has been a cult favorite in the late 90s and early 2000s until they broke into the mainstream with "Good News For People Who Love Bad News".  I've loved nearly all of their albums so far and have been a fan of them for years...and yet I was extremely cautious about this upcoming album. Their 2015 album, "Strangers to Ourselves", has only really gotten worse with time for me. It's not a terrible album, but one that was messy, bursting at the seams with a lot of interesting ideas along with a lot of half-baked ideas, making the album rather incohesive, with some incredible standout tracks, but also some of their worst songs to date. The singles released in 2019 weren't that great either as Modest Mouse seemed to be trying to figure out their direction after that album but missing the mark. I was not going to pass up this new album by any means, but with the singles not quite hitting in the same way as even  the singles of "Strangers to Ourselves", I was beginning to worry...so did it end up a hidden success, or Modest Mouse's weakest album to date? In this case, thankfully...it was a success, though a rather peculiar one.

    I'll say right off the bat that this album is good in a different way than most Modest Mouse albums. It does its best to experiment with a more psychedelic playbook, something that the band has toyed around with early on albums like "The Moon and Antarctica" on but are now diving full force into it. This leads the the production which is...mixed. I did appreciate the warping bass and synths on "Fuck Your Acid Trip", or the more spacy songs like "Leave A Light On" or "Transmitting Receiving" that feels like a predecessor to "The Moon and Antarctica", but sometimes these mixes sound busy, like on the lead single "We Are Between", which clips the mix at points. That being said, when the production works well, it REALLY works, like on the adding of different elements on "We're Lucky" that make for a consistently exciting listen as you continue through it, making it an easy standout on the album, or even the consistent rollicking groove on "Walking and Running" that make it a fun listen all around.

    Lyrically, at first, I wasn't terribly impressed. Isaac Brock as a lyricist is able to work through turns of phrase and impressive use of metaphor to make his songs super interesting and fun to pick apart and analyze even further. Yet, with the first three songs on the album, I couldn't help but feel the lyrics were rather...repetitive, feeling rather dissimilar to the Modest Mouse I was familiar with. Yet, this is where the difference on this album comes in. Most Modest Mouse albums, they can be bleak, focusing on societal woes, struggles of faith, isolation and depression, even drug problems and not quite being able to push pass them. "The Golden Casket", however, has an underlying theme of positivity about it, and might just be the next step as far as Isaac Brock's acceptance of the life he leads and his steps to growing. "We Are Between" and "We're Lucky" are about just happy to be able to live between the dust and the stars of the vast universe we live in, and "Wooden Soldiers" conflicts with his plans for the future and just being happy to be here now with his wife. The album is focused on the world as it is right now, realizing that not everything is perfect, but also accepting that there is still something out there that can be discovered, as mentioned on "The Sun Hasn't Left", though it is also counterbalanced by the need to head back to that center point on the call to find balance on "Back to the Middle". "Transmitting Receiving", is an experimental song that is about the advances in technology that could get us closer to new discoveries, though it's an experiment that, honestly, feels very clunky with its grocery-list naming of different technological advances over the years. Then there's "Lace Your Shoes", an earnest song about Isaac's children growing up, noting the mundane and the important moments still to come in their lives, that make this song one of the most genuine songs Isaac has ever made. 

    The album is a much more consistent listening than their previous work on "Strangers to Ourselves", and while the standouts are not as apparent as on that album, they're more subtle with the album feeling more consistent and an overall more pleasant listen. The album isn't perfect (I'm not too keen on the jokey song "Never Fuck A Spider On The Fly" that seems targeted at critics), though the low points aren't nearly as bad as on "Strangers to Ourselves". It might not be on the same height as album from Modest Mouse's glory days in the late 90s through the 2000s, but it is still one that is worth your time regardless. It might be the Modest Mouse fan in me that really loved what they were going for on this album and might even be more charitable on this than I would argue most critics would be, but it's the type of positive and spacy project I'm glad they were able to make at some point in their careers.

    

Best Songs: "We're Lucky", "Walking and Running", "Wooden Soldiers", "The Sun Hasn't Left", "Lace Your Shoes", "Back to the Middle"

Worst Song: "Never Fuck A Spider On The Fly"

8/10 (Great)