Maybe we’re right, we’re not paranoid and everyone is out to get us. The Pentagon – the goddamn Pentagon – has admitted that UFO’s (which they say can also turn their nukes on and off) have been buzzing navy warships for decades, so maybe it’s not too crazy for Modest Mouse’s Isaac Brock to say he thinks “people” are trying to steal his brainwaves.
Brock referred jokingly to this and some of the other ideas about technology and observation culture as his “tinfoil hat” concept for The Golden Casket, the band’s first album in six years. Personally though after decades of turmoil he’s now found happiness in the relative calm of fatherhood, an experience reflected upon with Lace Up Your Shoes, whilst both We’re Lucky and We Are Between are ruminations on stability and the randomness of being alive on this tiny spec of rock and water, even if it is being annexed by little green men.
That being watched feeling was never going quietly though, hence you guess the psychobabble lyrics of Wooden Soldiers being afraid of the hum, whilst Never Fuck A Spider On The Fly is a warning to online trolls. A musically complicated record, what the suits at their major label will make of that or the likes of bubbling pysch-pop opener Fuck Your Acid Trip is anyone’s guess, but with The Golden Casket Modest Mouse – and Brock – may have recorded something our imminent new overlords can groove to inside the mothership.
You can read a full review here.