• Road To Nowhere: Modest Mouse’s This Is a Long Drive For Someone With Nothing To Think About, Twenty Years Later

    March 31, 2016 - By 

    What do you think of when you hear the phrase ‘driving music’? As musical notions go, it’s one that usually comes with a specific set of aesthetic criteria. Upbeat tempos, big choruses, maybe the occasional indulgent guitar solo. This Is A Long Drive For Someone With Nothing To Think About, the debut of Issaquah indie rockers Modest Mouse, turned twenty last Saturday. While directly referencing both a long journey and a clear mind, if anything this album is the protracted, pensive inverse of canonical ‘driving music’ – ‘Don’t Stop Me Now’ with a dicey hangover. Modest Mouse emerged in the…

  • Modest Mouse @ The Helix, Dublin

    July 14, 2015 - By 

    The grand, university setting of the Helix is not the most obvious choice for a band with a legacy built on working class indie rock but as with everything else in Modest Mouse’s tumultuous career, they try their best to build something out of nothing. Armed with a setlist of crowd-pleasers, the band work their way through a career worth of tracks. Opening with the slow building ‘Of Course We Know’, closer of their most recent album, Strangers To Ourselves, they set the pace for a set filled with their characteristically cynical but sad, fucked up but victorious output. Despite claims…

  • Modest Mouse – Strangers To Ourselves

    March 17, 2015 - By 

    Given their track record, the announcement of a new Modest Mouse record should be cause for excitement; lest we forget Lonesome Crowded West and The Moon and Antarctica. While their 2007 effort, We Were Dead Before This Ship Even Sank, was somewhat lacking, the group have such a unique sound and energy that this could be written off as an unfortunate blip in an stellar track record. Sadly, while Strangers to Ourselves does have many excellent tracks it, fundamentally, is a messy and disappointing album. Beginning with a solid one-two of ‘Strangers to Ourselves’ and ‘Lampshades on Fire’, the album…