Capsule Reviews: Modest Mouse, Panda Bear
Modest Mouse – We Were Dead Before The Ship Even Sank
From the opening moments of WWDBTSES—god, even the acronym’s a mouthful—it's apparent that Modest Mouse frontman Isaac Brock has become a capital-R Rock Star, perhaps the oddest one since David Byrne: track one, “March Into The Sea,” finds the newly-svelte songwriter frothing and howling from word one. The man hasn't lost his knack for colorful illustrations of human nature, tossing off wry observations like "You're not invisible inside your car" with the cynical discourtesy of an exceptionally well-read junkyard dog. Aside from a handful of palatable concessions, notably the ubiquitous “Dashboard” and likely follow-up single “Fire It Up,” Dead swings wildly between noisy brawlers and remarkably intimate--shall we say romantic?—ballads with an engaging bipolarity.
It’s unfortunate that the band’s new marquee Mouse, former Smiths guitarist Johnny Marr, winds up with so little to do here. While his occasional backing vocals provide a stable contrast to Brock's unhinged delivery, anyone expecting Marr's virtuosic guitar stylings will be sorely disappointed. But while Dead fails to take Modest Mouse into uncharted territory, the rollicking biliousness of songs like "Florida" and "Parting Of The Sensory" prove Modest Mouse are still far from treading water.
Panda Bear – Person Pitch
Much like his namesake, Panda Bear, a.k.a. Noah Lennox, is the cooler, calmer, more collected member of the gleefully odd indie-experimental band Animal Collective. Panda Bear's solo albums showcase an artist remarkably adept at creating surprising emotional directness out of cloudy, software-assisted sonic abstraction; Person Pitch, his third, is a sonically rich slice of twee psychedelia, largely constructed from samples and found sounds, and certainly the most expansive and textured album he’s yet produced. While words like “inspirational” or “spiritual” carry a lot of negative baggage, they do well to describe the pure, unfettered uplift of tracks like “Comfy In Nautica,” which reduces Beach Boys-style pop to a hypnotic vocal loop, or closer “Ponytail,” with its melancholic, empty-church keyboard melody. While a few of the more epic tracks go a bit long in the tooth, for open-minded listeners Person Pitch could well be the perfect springtime sleeper.
