Aaron’s Best of the Decade: #5

#5
Modest Mouse – 3rd Planet
Album:  The Moon & Antarctica
Year: 2000

The Moon & Antarctica is the second indie album that I ever put on and listened to start to finish. I didn’t want to get up and walk away for fear that it would vanish, turning out to be a tantalizing dream. The opening guitar line, a squiggly Modest Mouse trademark, is practically shorthand for ‘here comes some awesome’. Isaac Brock brings along one of his signature vocal trips, doting on irony (“everything that keeps me together is falling apart”) and playing with his own little creation myth.

The production here is flawless. For those who jumped on board the Modest Mouse train circa this this album or “Float On”, perhaps this doesn’t feel revelatory, but their pre-2000 catalog was a flurry of groundbreaking guitar sound that alienated as many listeners as it attracted with its lo-fi angst. The Moon & Antarctica was Modest Mouse‘s shift to Epic Records, a subsidiary of big bad wolf Sony/Columbia, and the production budget here was put to work beautifully – not squeaky-clean and poppy as had been feared, but rather atmospheric, busy, and yet placing each epiphanic moment under a microscope. No longer would you have to assume Modest Mouse‘s brilliance through the drunken shambles of their live show. A record, a full LP, was in existence, and it crystallized every one of their strengths as a gift to old fans and a beacon to new ones. At the doorway, ushering you in grandiosely while warning you that their ‘only art’ is ‘fucking people over’, is “3rd Planet”.