The Singles Jukebox

Good news for people who love long stretches between album releases…

[Video]
[4.75]

Alfred Soto: The last time Modest Mouse released an album the Democrats had gained control of the Senate after twelve years in the wilderness. They haven’t lost their sense of tension: the suspicion that every stanza is about to shatter with a single guitar down stroke or a surprise Isaac Brock gulp. Other than my wanting to sing “busy busy, ew uhhhh, lampshade on fire” when I see the title, a bit of alright, this.
[7]

Rebecca A. Gowns: Oh my God, has it really been so long since the last Modest Mouse album? 8 years have passed, and you would think they would have been experimenting with different things in that large span of time… but this sounds so much like a bonus track from We Were Dead Before the Ship Even Sank that it makes my head spin. “We made the same mistakes,” Isaac Brock yelps, and yes! I agree! They are making the same mistakes! “We Were Dead” would have sounded wonderful and refreshing if it came out in 2005 instead of 2007, but instead, it sounded instantly dated upon release. The fact that this single also sounds like 2005 is dispiriting. However, I am a big-time fan who would have gotten Modest Mouse lyrics tattoo’ed on me (if it was legal to do as a 14-17 year old), and I have to admit that no matter how deeply corny I find this song, it also thrills me to the bone.
[7]

Scott Mildenhall: Smash Mouth sound disappointingly more het up these days.
[4]

Micha Cavaseno: Modest Mouse was always a peculiar thing to me: the voice of a lot of my generation, even for my younger sister and people older than I were captivated by the herky-jerky Byrne-like vocals and “insipidity” of Isaac Brock. To me it was always a strange bit of sincere-core bar chat over something that tried to pretend it wasn’t trying to rock all the time, but different strokes, y’know? This is a Modest Mouse song and there’s no denying that, but I’m sure there’s gallons of kids who are chewing their nails because it sounds too poppy and a bunch of other folk getting burnt out on the rigidity of this shtick.
[3]

Patrick St. Michel: Modest Mouse is one of my favorite bands ever, one deserving of notebook-margin scribbling and AIM away messages. I haven’t listened to them since… 2008? That’s fine, as we can’t forever walk around lugging a Case Logic full of our favorite CDs with us. At some point, favorites become statues, set in a specific period. “Lampshades on Fire” is a Modest Mouse song, one with a bit too much pirate chanting but with a nice drive to it. It’s fine, blessed with Sony’s big-money sheen, but that’s about it.
[5]

Edward Okulicz: The dad-rap is too long and too rubbish to give a pass to, but otherwise this is a very crisp bit of indie rock. The drumming, in particular, gives it a real kick and variety and I like the yelp of desperation in Isaac Brock’s voice here.
[7]

Thomas Inskeep: Hey, we’re wacky! In that corporate “modern rock” sense, that is. Remember when Modest Mouse was on Up Records in the mid-’90s and releasing genuinely off-kilter “if Radiohead were American” records? Yeah, forget all that, because now they’ve become a radio programmer’s wet dream in the worst possible way.
[2]

Cédric Le Merrer: To think that all these years I had thought that Modest Mouse’s years of silence was due to the realization by all that We Were Dead… sucked. Turns out they come back with the same drunk stompy shit, the same ugly ta-da-das, the same boring existentialist pseudo raps about how everything’s just the same boring shit over and over again. Way to fulfill your own prophecies. 
[3]