Dead, but so very alive

All the clever indie kids who are nay saying Modest Mouse's latest album as a sell-out endeavor need to give it up right now. Contrary to fashionable opinion, Modest Mouse's most heavily produced and catchiest album to date, We Were Dead Before the Ship Even Sank, still holds true to Isaac Brock's tweaked-out sensibilities and succeeds in delivering yet another sharp, dark foray into witty wordplay and fatal hopelessness.\nWith their third album at major label Epic, the old-school indie staple explores a fuller sound with the addition of The Smiths' guitarist Johnny Marr, exhibiting amazing technical grace interwoven with Brock's unique vocals, which sound like a choking victim. Die-hard Modest Mouse fans will be happy to know that all the production in the world couldn't change Brock's iconic voice, still as grating and heart-wrenching as ever. The fuller, guitar-heavy instrumentals do nothing to detract from the bleak, morbid message we've come to expect from Modest Mouse. If anything, the addition of Marr has made the deadly lyrics more accessible to a wider audience.\nThe ironic pop-sounds of "Florida," "Fire it Up" and "We've Got Everything," with their toe-tapping catchiness and dark, bitter lyrics, perfectly balance the epic sadness of the creepy, heartbreaking ballads, "Parting of the Sensory," "People as Places as People" and "Little Motel." With these slower tunes comes a deep pathos of regret and bittersweet nostalgia with the drifter persona Brock often falls into. The songs "Spitting Venom," "Steam Engenius" and "Education" showcase classic Isaac Brock rage. They leave the listener wondering how, album after album, this man still finds unique ways to express the subcutaneous vitriol he always does with spot-on, calculated precision.\nThis album is nothing less than the natural evolution of the Modest Mouse sound, the new fullness only being a further developed conduit for the same bleak message of old.