Gravity Rides Everything

Cover of The Moon & Antarctica

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Modest Mouse, "Gravity Rides Everything" (download until 2/23/09), from "The Moon and Antarctica."

I was told once by a good friend to check out Modest Mouse, as he said their writing and singing reminded him of me. I bought this record. Truth be told, I wasn't insulted by the comparison and I appreciated a number of the tunes on it. Unfortunately, it was a small number. That said, there certainly are some tunes on it that I still, after some years now, come back to, and this is one.

I have a long pattern of actively avoiding the indie flavor of the month, going all the way back to when R.E.M. broke to the extent they did. I think I first read about R.E.M. in Rolling Stone around the time of "Reckoning," so it should be said that I was paying attention but I wasn't so cool as to get into them around "Murmur" time. What I can say, though, is that one of my good enough friends in high school--or was it middle school?--was into R.E.M. enough, and she was going on and on about how cool they were, and so I avoided them like the plague, even though she was cool and we thought at the time that Rolling Stone actually had valid points to make. I didn't end up getting into R.E.M. at all until "Lifes Rich Pageant," when they got so popular I couldn't avoid them.

Now, Modest Mouse are, like basically all indie flavors of the month, overrated. The question in this case is, "how overrated." R.E.M. is the most overrated band of all time, as far as I can tell. Even U2, seriously, seriously overrated, or Radiohead--wow...now there's an overrated band--has more to offer than R.E.M. The thing with R.E.M. is that there's not really anything they're great at. Certainly not lyrics. That crap might have impressed people in the high school lit mag, but putting them to the public takes some serious chutzpah, or plain idiocy. Likely both. Musically, they're fair, at best. It comes together for them in a moderately original way, about as original as you can be while remaining fundamentally derivative. That's really the indie flavor of the month formula: derive the music from a particular combination of sources that the hipsters already know. The particular combination is what's new, not the sources.

So if you mixed this track a little differently, you'd have an outtake from My Bloody Valentine, something left on the floor while they were recording "Loveless." Drop the vocals way down so you can't make out the words--not a bad idea in this case--add a log drum, overdub the guitar swoops so that there are a number of tracks playing close to the same thing so that the slight variations in performance, slightly out of sync with each other, have that beautiful feeling of comfortable, vague disorientation you get with Kevin Shields, and there you go. The structure of the song itself is much more conventional than anything MBV would do, but that doesn't mean it's not good.

I wonder if someday we'll go back to the point where popular music is great and great music is popular. Maybe, if only on a microscopic level. Each producer of great music will be able to reach the small social network she or he has through Myspace, Facebook, or whatever, and we'll each have our own little click. Not a bad world, but a world without the Beatles, for sure.