Modest Mouse’s We Were Dead Before The Ship Even Sank

This week I want to talk about Modest Mouse’s latest release, We Were Dead Before the Ship Even Sank. But before I do, I feel that I have to come clean about something. I’m not one of those die-hard Modest Mouse fans that followed them long before they had any mainstream success. I hopped on the bandwagon after the release of Good News For People Who Like Bad News. Even now, I own most of it’s earlier releases, but I would only really call myself a fan of Modest Mouse circa 2004 and later.

That said, in many ways I wasn’t disappointed by We Were Dead, which was released on March 30 this year. At least, I wasn’t disappointed in it the first time I listened to it. Even the second time through, I appreciated the arrangement and some of the lyrics. But then I listened to it a third time.

The album opens with “March into the Sea”. After an odd and half-hearted accordion intro, the grunge guitar, coupled with front man Isaac Brock chuckling throatily to the beat of the song, draws in the listener. The sound itself lives up to the band’s precedent. What I realized the more I listened, though, was that the lyrics fell short. Unable to follow the plot of the song by just listening to it, I Googled the lyrics. (Click here to view the lyrics of every song on We Were Dead.) “March into the Sea” opens like this: “If food needed pleasing/You’d suck all the seasoning off/Lick it off!” The lyrics that follow are even more muddled and nonsensical. A sampling:

“I’ll be beating my heart’s record for speeding
I’ll be beating the record for heart skipping

Oh, the doggone tails, well they fell off
But we just turned back, marched into the sea
..Well, we just turned around, marched into the sea

Take all that you need
Let my saxophone free
Till it’s gone, till it’s gone

Well, this coffee you bleed
Like the leaves of a tree
Ahaha! Ahaha!

Let’s shake hands if you want
But you– both hands are gone!
Oh, haha! Haha!”

Admittedly, most of the songs are not quite as disjointed as the first one. Not lyrically, anyway. Most of the album is much like everything else Modest Mouse has released–a jaded and cynical collection of melancholy musings. The only novelty that We Were Dead adds to the repertoire is an abundance of ship imagery. I don’t mean to imply that this is entirely bad. I like their earlier work, and would have been disappointed if I couldn’t see any of the band I knew coming through in the most recent release. But as my roommate (whom I look to as my musical guru) said, “they’re capitalizing on the image they’ve made for themselves. . . they have this niche that they’ve carved out, and their new album should do something new, not just re-do what they’ve already done.”

“It’s still good, it’s just not interesting or novel.”

That pretty much sums up the accomplishments of We Were Dead. The band certainly succeeded at perpetuating the sound that made them famous, but fell short of achieving anything noteworthy with their new album.

I assumed that the album title was mostly just a nod to the album’s nautical theme. But the more I listened to it, I began to wonder if it was a little more prophetic. If the album itself were a ship, it certainly did sink in a slew of mediocre reviews (click here for the Rolling Stone Review, and here customer reviews from Amazon.com). Could it have been more of an admission that whatever well of creativity that was tapped during the production of Good News ran dry when the band set out to record We Were Dead?