Consumer Guide Album

Modest Mouse: The Lonesome Crowded West [Up, 1997]
With unadorned melody suddenly fashionable among superannuated indie-rockers who have seen the limits of both irony and techno, I still prefer my tunelets noised up. And until these become the exclusive province of undistinguisheds and indistinguishables like, oh, Versus or Polvo, I'll crow about every exception. Skirting the professional class they were born to for a poverty that's real if voluntary, these three youngsters are probably wise-asses, probably thieves. But their songs never quit even when they're divided into the kind of stylistic segments that usually irritate the hell out of me. Although their glimpses of a cockroach world living on its own discards may seem jejune to some and homely to others, the lyrics are observed, informed, and explicit enough--in fact, as brave and beautiful as the blues, albeit at a more rarefied level of cultural specificity. A-