(Photo Courtesy of Up Records)Take a moment to consider the family car ride from your home to a relative's house for Thanksgiving. On this drive, you see various storerooms, U-Haul trucks, abandoned buildings and, if you’re headed north, outlet malls. The drive is tedious, long and there isn’t much legroom and everything outside is expansive, but marred by several inorganic concrete structures. In some areas, the terrain looks unfettered, but upon close glance, you notice a seemingly endless barbed wire fence blocks it.
One of the most prevalent themes of the Modest Mouse album, "The Lonesome Crowded West," is the graveyard we as a society are constructing for ourselves. Associating mini malls and various other commercial buildings to mausoleums, West offers a macro level view of a treacherous, misguided direction our culture is heading.
On Nov. 18, 1997, this musical achievement was released into the audio realm. The album has been celebrated by many as a piece of work that significantly contributed to the music scene of the late '90s and one that helped bring on the modern independent music scene that we know today. Produced by indie legend Calvin Johnson and released on Up Records, West embodies the spirit of the decade and especially grasps the fleeting, uneasy feeling of the latter years.
1997 was a transitional period, with the forces of globalization beginning to take hold around the world and massive commercial expansion spanning across the world. It was an odd time.
Songs like “Teeth Like God’s Shoeshine,” “Convenient Parking” and “Cowboy Dan” all speak to these themes with lyrics often venting frustration about the conquering of nature by pseudo-civilized culture. In “Cowboy Dan,” a song that follows the classic concept of the cowboy and its place in the modern day, these feelings are expressed clearly when Modest Mouse front man Isaac Brock roars, “I didn’t move to the city, the city moved to me / And I want out, desperately.”
The album is not entirely detached culture commentary, however. In classic Modest Mouse style, Brock’s songwriting captures the essence of travel and how it relates to the human experience. Often employing metaphors of travel by car as a means to get away, Brock does not comment from above, but puts himself in the struggle with the rest of us. Songs like “Bankrupt on Selling” and “Trailer Trash” take an honest approach to industrial realities of the day, while personalizing them to an inescapably empathetic point. The social requirements of education and money are inescapable, and Brock sees the whole late '90s socioeconomic landscape leading toward destruction of what makes us human.
In “Lounge (Closing Time),” Brock sings, “I’ve got a girlfriend out of the city / I know I like her, I think she is pretty.” At seven minutes and four seconds, “Lounge” is the second-longest song on the album, featuring a windy jam. This idea of travel as experience through the cold shows up again and again in songs like “Out of Gas” and “Trucker’s Atlas.”
But even with the various industrial distractions lamented by the album, you realize you have to actively look for these commercial tombs. Even more impressive are the clouds and the way the sun reflects and refracts off its moisture; the trees that seem so distant at one moment, but surround you the next.
After the punishing, steady beat of "Cowboy Dan" supports Isaac Brock’s declarative lyrics, after Brock shouts to God, “If I have to die, you will have to die,” the song cools off, mellows out and the listener is graced with serene imagery of “standing in the tall grass.” This type of tonal shift reflects the nature of the late year, specifically November, and the ability to notice both the destructive and the positive is what makes this album a American landmark.
Thus, in this way, West embodies the spirit of November: Transition from the stresses of fall into a holiday season that is increasingly more interested in the mass production and ultimate consumption of commercial goods than in the core tenets of its inception, but with the flicker of hope being the landscape that surrounds all of us.
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