CD of The Week

It’s wild that Modest Mouse had only released one proper album in the 11 years since their mainstream breakthrough Good News For People Who Love Bad News. Isaac Brock and his ever-shifting crew put out We Were Dead Before The Ship Even Sank back in 2007, and aside from the leftovers/B-sides collection No One’s First And You’re Next in '09, have been pretty silent ever since. The band had been working on and off for years on new material, while regularly touring. Collaborations with Big Boiand Krist Novoselic were abandoned along the way, and at long last, Strangers To Ourselves arrives this week.

As you’d expect, the Mouse sprawl out in all directions on their newest album. Strangers... gets off to a slow, moody start with the title track, then lead single “Lampshades On Fire” kicks in. Once again, the band channels early Talking Heads through Brock’s signature sound, with lyrics about escaping man-made environmental destruction just to mess it all up again. (Also not far off from some of David Byrne’s past themes.) The specter of environmental disaster pops up again elsewhere on Strangers To Ourselves.

The record is a mixed bag of earlier, spacier Mouse and their '00s vibe. We Were Dead…beefed up their sound to the most muscular it’d ever been, with Johnny Marr and James Mercer on board for the ship ride, and Mercer is back again on this album. But songs like “Coyotes” and the contemplative, spare “Pups To Dust” could have come fromThe Moon & Antarctica era.

“The Ground Walks, With Time In A Box” is the longest song on the album but also the most rocking, with some classic Brock guitar riffs. There are plenty of oddball tracks that leap out along the way, from the growling "Pistol (A. Cunanan, Miami, FL, 1996),” which appears to be sung the POV of the man who killed Gianni Versace (What a random song topic! Also, FYI to Isaac, Wikipedia tells me that incident happened in 1997). Other highlights include the Caribbean steel drums of “Ansel,” which tells the tale of a doomed trip south, and the straight-up carnival music that is “Sugar Boats.”

After all that fine tuning on Strangers To Ourselves, it feels like in the end Brock actually reigned in his sound rather than reinventing it in some way. The Mouse swung for the fences on the last two albums, and while I’m curious what a funky, Outkast-infused record would have been like, Strangers To Ourselves almost seems slightly conservative by comparison. But I’m still happy to have these Northwestern weirdos making music after 20+ years. As of now, the closest the Mouse will get to Philly is at Delaware’sFirefly Festival this summer, your chance to set some tax-free lampshades on fire.