If you’re an indie rock fan or have ever listened to a mainstream alt-rock station, you probably know about Modest Mouse’s 2004 radio hit Float On. Such a cheery, optimistic song! Surely, the rest of the band’s music is also like that.
The band’s second album, The Lonesome Crowded West, was released in 1997 and is best described as a manic depressive neo-western. The album is a good example of Modest Mouse’s earlier, more abrasive sound while also having some chiller indie rock aspects mixed in. The “manic depressive” part of the description is pretty easy to see with just a few songs: Teeth Like God’s Shoeshine is a mad, chaotic opening to the album that immediately switches to the calmer Heart Cooks Brain. The album switches between rage, serenity, and depression even within songs.
The neo-western part, though, is where it gets interesting. There’s the obvious Cowboy Dan, a song about a washed-up cowboy drunk screaming at the sky, but there’s also Convenient Parking, a song about the wild frontier of Washington State being paved over for suburbs and office parks. All the cowboys and buffalo and explorers have been phased out for the businessmen and lawyers on the bus chowing down on junk food like how “dogs eat their own s***” in Doin’ The Cockroach. Cowboy Dan should be a smooth, sexy antihero cowboy, but he’s actually a pitiful piece of s***, unable to adapt to his new suburban surroundings. All he’s ever known is violence, a tool that’s supremely useless in an office park. His big dramatic stand, yelling at the sky that “God, if I have to die, you will have to die,” would be kinda cool if he could actually do anything to God in his current state. In Teeth Like God’s Shoeshine, the area’s new “malls are the soon-to-be ghost towns”. Like the frontier’s gold boom towns, the food courts and shopping centers will soon also be empty and abandoned, left to rot as suburbia consumes, digests, and spits out the once wild west, fuel for the next phase in America’s evolution. There are countless other examples of Wild West motifs similarly spun not as heroic, but as desperate or grim. In Teeth Like God’s Shoeshine, a sheriff in Buffalo, Montana, gets bitten by a snake and falls on his face. The narrator in Heart Cooks Brain compares his heart to a buffalo being driven over the cliff of his brain. The West is changing from a rural way of life calling back to the frontier to a more “civilized” way of freeways, chain restaurants, and tech companies, creating a simultaneously lonesome and crowded land and leaving the old timers like Cowboy Dan destitute in the dust. Remind you of anywhere?
The album clearly draws from singer Isaac Brock’s own experiences. Born in Montana, Brock was raised chiefly in lower-class, rural America-- including Issaquah, Washington, then a small town in Seattle’s orbit. Brock also spent some time in Washington, DC and New York City before returning to Issaquah just in time to witness a population boom and the urbanization that followed. As Cowboy Dan sings, “didn’t move to the city, the city moved to me.” Seeing his rural, small-town home gentrify and urbanize, the cities he left following him back home certainly inspired a good chunk of the album. A motif of substance abuse also shows up in Cowboy Dan, Long-Distance Drunk, and Polar Opposites. The bleakness of The Lonesome Crowded West heavily draws from the suburbanization and transformation of Brock’s small town home and way of life, and the isolation that comes with it—something many West Virginians may be able to relate to with the advent of data centers and the Eastern Panhandle’s increasing sprawl.
The Lonesome Crowded West shows a darker side to Modest Mouse than their radio-friendly hits, expressing anger, sadness, and hopelessness over a rapidly changing world that leaves so many behind without a second thought. As fights over data centers and development happen across our state, The Lonesome Crowded West is a cautionary tale more relevant than ever for West Virginia.