"life handed us a paycheck, we said 'we worked harder than this!'"

While it disappoints me that only two of the first 25 Epinions on Modest Mouse’s Good News for People who Love Bad News give the album five stars, it intrigues me that no one’s accusing it of being a “sell-out”. It _isn’t_, of course, but it has the hallmarks of albums that get treated that way:

-- Several of the songs reject the conventions (and energy) of rock music for older forms.

-- The lyrics show Isaac Brock starting to adapt to the world: finding things to enjoy, putting aside some of his anger, and making the anger he has left more specific, aimed, and justified.

-- And, of course, it spawned an actual hit single, increasing Modest Mouse’s sales at least tenfold (probably more).

But instead of cries of “sell-out!”, what I’m seeing in the Good News reviews is criticism for being too “experimental”, too “odd”, too “out there”. And to my surprise, I think I understand those charges. Yet if the outside form of the new Modest Mouse cd is something new under the sun, its roots are deep and tangled. Good News, I’m left to conclude, is not simply a great record, but a great new piece of Americana.

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Which is terribly vague of me, of course. So, let’s start over: Modest Mouse have been making indie-rock albums for about a decade. Their songs have often been obsessed with drinking, drifting, and disconnection; their guitar tones have most often floated between a lax, dissonant country-rock and a harsh attack that gives off shrapnel. Singer Isaac Brock, with his high-pitched (usually) drawl, uses the musical scale to declaim, yelp, bray, plead, shrug, soothe, announce, growl, and sometimes just harmonize. Early on their format was generic rock trio, and I wasn’t too keen on them; but starting with the Moon and Antarctica, they became both open-minded and selective about what instruments could belong where on each song.

That album made use of classy-sounding organ and strings, and icy synthesizers, so we all knew it was Art. Good News, on the other hand, brings in banjo, trombone, accordion, fiddle, tin whistle, and the Dirty Dozen Brass Band. These synthesizers vibrate and tremble and buzz; and sometimes the drummer’s playing timpani and kettle drums while you can’t hear the bass at all. Since when does Art sound like that?

Since now, I guess; or, then again, since a century ago. If cd’s had come out back then, would it be so odd to have a pretty 58-second pump-organ solo? Would it seem odd that “Blame it on the Tetons” is mumble-sung over piano, acoustic guitar, fiddle, shuffling drums, and airy harmonies? “The World at Large” is a rock song, but with slow-dance steadiness, a piper, and a vocal delivery like prayer. “Bukowski” is dusty folk/country, with Brock’s doubled voice echoing like footsteps in an abandoned house.

The lithe syncopation of “One Chance” is modern, the ringing guitar distortion is Modern Rock, and the frantic “I’m just a box, just a box in a cage” section is pure punk; but the sincere, sing-along verses are campfire folk, no matter how they’re produced. The overdriven “Bury Me With It” is punk like Tom Waits would arrange punk: the ukelele, the whirling fife-n-drums, the mad carnival-barker delivery and twirling beat, the split personalities arguing in the background. “Dance Hall” is even more frantically punk, but most of it sounds like it was recorded on 1912 equipment and then buried, while it’s the chorus’s glockenspiel and glistening keyboards that ring clear. “This Devil’s Workday” has a fabulously catchy banjo hook, thus setting vocals and horns from New Orleans speakeasy jazz sessions against the gas from the Lousiana swamp. “The Good Times are Killing Me” is as recent as 1967 in parts, but the decorated “Penny Lane” background doesn’t keep its simple beat and “doot-doot” harmonies from being the pure acoustic skiffle that the Beatles played before they were the Beatles. And “Satin in a Coffin” mixes rock’s directness, a beat and trombone worthy of John Philip Sousa marches, and a guitar hook like a folk dirge.

This is not, by the way, to deny that Modest Mouse can kick out a great pure Rock song. “Black Cadillacs” opens with quiet pitch-bends, but mainly it kicks up a great stomp with an acrobatic guitar lead (though also some dainty piano chording). “The View” is a faster, denser, earthier flurry of the elements U2 stretched out to make songs like “Where the Streets Have No Name”. “Ocean Breathes Salty” has the shimmering, spacious guitar feel of such eighties’ rock bands as Echo & the Bunnymen, the Comsat Angels, and the Chameleons (and maybe Unforgettable Fire-era U2) – even as the keyboard feels like a calliope. And “Float On”, the hit, simplifies down to a kick/snare beat and lots of one-note-repeated guitar, staying interesting with a non-threatening array of guitar effects, simple solos, and gentle synthesizer backgrounds.

But the result, of course, is that “Float On” enticed hundreds of thousands of buyers who had every right to expect an entire album of rock songs. The way my Mom raised me, folk songs and marches and calliopes are at least as easy and obvious a language as power chords, to the point where I didn’t even notice, by myself, what a strange combination Modest Mouse make of them: I was too busy rocking out instead. But is it surprising that, to people my Mom did _not_ raise, Good News seems erratic and difficult?

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“Erratic and difficult” is something Isaac Brock is used to being, anyway. “Walked away to another plan/ Gonna find another place, maybe one I can stand” is almost the first statement on the album; he “went to the porch to have a thought/ Got to the door and again, I couldn't stop”. His temper still leads to outbursts of lyrics like “Are you dead or are you sleeping? God, I sure hope you are dead”, or “I am the captain and you are in the galley” … and while I’m glad those are rare now, he enjoys them enough that I’d be sad if he got over them entirely.

But people who spend their whole lives angry have only a few long-run options, and most of them are bad: alcoholism, suicide, jail, heart attacks, candidacies on the Green Party ticket or talk shows on Fox News. Part of my joy in hearing Good News for People who Love Bad News is listening to Brock as he tries, in his earnest and questing way, to avoid such fates.

When the first song says “I like songs about drifters, books about the same/ they both seem to make me feel a little less insane”, it’s the first time he’s admitted that maybe the places and people he leaves are not the ones at fault. “Blame it on the Tetons” makes it explicit: “I need a scapegoat now”. But (Charles) “Bukowksi”, about the drifting-est and meanest of the great beat writers, is the most surprising continuation of the theme: “Yeah, I know he's a pretty good read, but God who'd wanna be such an assshole?” That’s perfect – but I’d have assumed the answer to “who” would have been “Isaac Brock”. Maybe in 1997, I’d have been right.

This doesn’t, of course, mean that Brock is about to make a happy album of love songs and potato-salad recipes. He’s trying to understand people, and to be less cruel to them, but he doesn’t have to like how they act. Instead, like an academic writing essays about “socioeconomic influences”, he's learning to see the limits imposed on people. Only Brock, going straight to the source of our original and photocopied sins, blames God. God’s an inventive bugger, sure, at least assuming that He isn’t the Brian DePalma to some other deity’s Hitchcock; but He’s had a few billion years to get His design perfect, and Brock can hardly be blamed for tossing out some overdue suggestions.

Language, for example: is that the best He could do for us? “Great for solving problems, after it creates a problem”: indeed. Look at all the nonsense our emotions tell us to worry about: “So proud of ourselves for using so many verbs and nouns/ but we’re dumb, dumb, dumber than the dirt, dirt, dirt on the ground” (because hey, when did the dirt last need a scapegoat for anything?). “I’m gonna angle for telepathy cuz I don’t know the words to say”: who is this Creator who hands around tools with no instructions, anyhow? Brock and I and probably you are as ill-equipped as the people we hate; why should we blame each other, weakness attacking weakness?

“Got dirt, got air, got water, and I know you carry on”: something’s wrong with that equation, even if it’s hard to decide what. Maybe it’s that, while they keep us alive, they can’t really satisfy. “My friends, my habits, my family, they mean so much to me” sounds like a simple recipe for a life; but multiply those habits across six billion great-great-great-to-infinity grandkids of the original family, even the habits of _needing_ dirt, air, and water, and by now you “don’t drink the water, don’t breathe the air” if you know what’s good for you. Did God learn nothing about renewable resources in school, or did He just feel like being secretive about them?

And besides, once we have those loud, nagging brains with their insistent little ideas, air/water/dirt isn’t really enough. We start wanting to make stuff and get stuff, and suddenly the people with a lot of stuff start having guns and bankers on their side. Until one day, “We were shootin' at a mound of dirt/ Well nothing was broken, nothing was hurt/ But I probably really should have been at work”. And once we have those ideas infesting our head, no wonder “We were aiming at the moon/ we were shooting at the stars” has to be rendered in past tense. A universe full of new dirt, and it hangs over our heads to mock us, because we’re too busy. Whose idea was that? Probably no one Isaac can punch out, and he’s learning that.

“We have just one chance to get everything right” : Brock isn’t a Buddhist, but you probably aren’t either, so what’s with that stupid Death looking bad with his black hood and his scythe, ready to cut off our plans without a moment’s notice? Why doesn’t Judgment Day come with a big start-over area for the billions of Not Guilty by Reason of Insanity? But then Brock completes the rhyme with “if we’re lucky, we might”: ahh, there’s the thing a cynic learns last.

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If your introduction to Modest Mouse was with “Float On” – and why wouldn’t it have been? – you might love the song without recognizing how amazing it is. “Good news will work its way into all them plans … and we’ll all float on okay” could, for all the radio world knows, be the thoughts of a stoned hippie (which Brock sorta sings like on that song). Instead, they are the thoughts – budding, tentative – of one of the most perceptively unhappy minds in the music scene. The songs of Good News flirt with love, connection, forgiveness, and small pleasures.

They do so humbly, by adapting centuries of ideas from other artists who, in their own one chance at life, struggled as intelligently as they could to find their own purposes. Isaac Brock may know even less than I do of the lives of Robert Johnson and John Philip Sousa and Bix Beiderbecke, but he’s learned to know their kindred spirits. They put their thoughts into the finest scared or joyful noises they could make. I think maybe, if God exists, that’s what He wanted of us all along. But if it’s not, fine: we’re built to make our own values, and we will.