Send "Modest Mouse " Ringtones to your Cell 
| Pitchfork |
 Isaac Brock and his friends were teenagers when they wrote the songs on Sad Sappy Sucker. Think about the shitty poems you wrote when you were young (I have one that plagiarizes Green Day's "Longview"!) and then listen to the splintered and elusive songs collected on this Modest Mouse release. Clearly, Brock had a head start on seeing things differently from the rest of us.That is one of the more profound takeaways from the so-called Great Lost Modest Mouse album, a 24-track collection of occasionally brilliant odds and ends that was spared the fate of being the band's introduction to the world. Delays forced them to move on and record This Is a Long Drive for Someone With Nothing to Think About before Sad Sappy Sucker could be released. From a historical vantage point, they lucked out-- Sucker has its moments, but they would take a quantum leap from here to This Is a Long Drive. Nonetheless, a few facets of Modest Mouse's unmistakable sound glint through on these songs, recorded with Calvin Johnson for K Records. There are those eerily pinging bent guitar harmonics, for one, a noise that sounded entirely alien at the time, as well as the way the guitar and bass circled warily around each other without locking, two halves of an endlessly spiraling argument. Jeremiah Green was already an astoundingly talented drummer, one who could fill every inch of available space without overwhelming Brock's harmonically simple songs. And Brock-- well, first of all, he sounds astoundingly young. His lisp, which would grow a little less noticeable over time, is almost painfully pronounced on Sad Sappy Sucker-- "Mice Eat Cheese"'s title is rendered "mithe eat cheethe." His singing is frail and nervous, and the words are often obscured by mumbling. The lyrics that do surface are like little placeholders for all of Brock's future lyrical obsessions-- "you can see that birds and worms don't get along," in "Worms Vs. Birds"; "Looks like accounting's not accountable for anything or anyone at all/ Jonny took the fall," he yelps in "Race Car Grin You Ain't No Landmark". The ringing opening guitar figure for "It Always Rains on a Picnic" would pop up almost unchanged on Long Drive's "Talking Shit About a Pretty Sunset"-- in fact, the former song sounds like a dry run for the latter. It's absorbing listening, but hardly consequential....full text |
| Exclaim |
| Despite the fact that it's been over three years since they've released a proper full-length, Modest Mouse are intent on doing anything but dropping a proper follow-up to 2007's We Were Dead Before the Ship Even Sank. The Pacific Northwest heroes released a collection of singles called No One's First and You're Next in 2009, and now they've revealed plans to reissue the out-of-print The Fruit That Ate Itself EP (pictured), along with their long-lost Sad Sappy Sucker album. Both releases were originally put out by venerable Olympia outfit K Records, but will see their reissues via Isaac Brock's own Glacial Pace label. The Fruit That Ate Itself came out in 1997, while Sad Sappy Sucker was originally meant to be the band's debut album in the mid-'90s, but was shelved to make way for This Is a Long Drive For Someone with Nothing to Think About. The album finally saw its original release in 2001. The Fruit That Ate Itself and Sad Sappy Sucker will be released on November 9. They will be available on 180-gram vinyl, CD or as a digital download. In place of the original plastic jewel cases, the CDs will come in a fold-out digipak. Pre-orders for both releases can be found here. Hopefully, the reissues will continue and we can get a coveted copy of Interstate 8 on vinyl....full text |
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