Good News For People Who Love Modest Mouse

by editor Michele Catalano

It’s often said that a band’s most popular album is not actually their best. Best albums in discographies often belong to the underdogs, to the records that never made the charts, never had songs played in sports arenas, were never heard blasting from cars in your neighborhood. 

The popular albums are ubiquitous: on the radio, in clothing stores, in the aforementioned places. They spawn hit singles, they help sell out concerts, they get the band’s likeness printed on T-shirts and posters. A band’s true fans will often find fault with the most popular albums, almost wave them off as being just not as good as the rest of the catalog. They will talk trash on people who think the most popular is also the best. If it’s your favorite album of the discography, you’re a bandwagon jumper, a fake fan. It’s just how it is.

I don’t subscribe to any of that. Okay, maybe a little bit with Faith No More. While The Real Thing is clearly their most popular—as it contains their most popular and most likely only song known outside of Faith No More fandom, “Epic”—it’s definitely my least favorite. Not because of popularity, but because I think it’s the weakest of their efforts and doesn’t show the true spectacle of Mike Patton’s voice. 

But I’m not here to talk about Faith No More. Not yet, at least. I’m here to talk about Modest Mouse. And I am here to defend Good News For People Who Love Bad News, their most popular album. It’s not my favorite Modest Mouse album—that title belongs to The Lonesome Crowded West—but it is a very, very good album. Unfortunately, a lot of Modest Mouse fans don’t feel that way, and I’ve seen them actually shun the record as if it weren’t a huge part of the band’s catalog. 

Of all the bands I’ve embraced over the years, I think Modest Mouse was hated most by my ex. Every time I would attempt to listen to an MM album, he would be palpably annoyed. “Do I have to listen to this?”  It didn’t really matter which MM album it was, he hated them all. “Turn it off,” he’d direct me, curtly. I’d sigh and turn the record off, acquiescing to his demands. It was just easier that way. Most of the time, I would head for the couch and my laptop and headphones to listen to the songs in peace. He’d still call out to me, “You still listening to that garbage?” as if it somehow offended him even though he could no longer hear it. 

He took his hatred of Modest Mouse personally, as if the band had been out to get him when they recorded “Float On,” a song he despised to the point of banning it from the house. He found it simple, aggravating, and pedestrian. This made me only like the song and the album more. I felt defiant when he saw me nodding along to the tunes in my headphones. Knowing I was listening to Modest Mouse irritated him in a way I can’t explain. Good News grew on me exponentially every time he mentioned how much he hated it. It was my small way of fighting back against him imposing his will on me. Liking it was an act of rebellion. Not just against him, but against the people online who decried the album as empty, just filler music.

I honestly love Good News. It’s not anything like the other albums I love so much. There’s no “Shit Luck” roaming around the titles. No “Talking Shit About a Pretty Sunset.” This Devil’s Workday” comes close, but the other songs are serviceable enough. I will admit that it’s a lesser album than its immediate predecessor, The Moon & Antarctica. I find Good News to be really enjoyable, which, when talking about Modest Mouse, is a flexible term. Sometimes you don’t enjoy Modest Mouse albums as much as you are infused with them; not with joy, but with something bordering on mysticism. 

I went through a phase where I listened to nothing but MM for weeks. This irritated my ex to no end. As always, I’d start with playing it out loud, either on vinyl or streaming. He’d be in another room or even in the garage, tinkering around, and he would come into the living room and look at me with a “really?” gesture. I was determined not to be made to feel uncomfortable in my own living room, but that would last a minute or two before I headed back to my headphones. I’d keep trying to listen to them out loud; not to break him down, but to break him in other ways. 

He didn’t like defiance. I didn’t like having to defy him. I wasn’t afraid of making him angry. In fact, I got a thrill when he was angry because he would go to the garage or leave the house altogether, and I could once again play the albums out in the open. It was a shitty way to deal with things, a shitty way to go about life. My in-your-face way of dealing with his dislike of my favorite bands and albums was probably a big reason why he packed up and left when he did.

As such, Good News became a touchstone for me. It is the record that made me feel like I had my own thing that he couldn’t touch. That he didn’t want to touch. That gave the record its own mystique to me. Songs like “Dance Hall” and “Bury Me With It” reminded me of older Modest Mouse. The rest of the album grew on me in a big way, and soon I had embraced it and gave it the gilded standing of “perfect.”

I said as much online, on Twitter, and was met with incredulity. So many people came out of the woodwork to declare it an “off” Modest Mouse album. Some decried it altogether. Some viewed it as an album for fake fans, as if “Float On” isn’t actually a really great song. Yes, it’s their most popular, but it’s also attractive in that it’s the least off-putting of their best songs. Tunes like”Shit Luck” off The Lonesome Crowded West, while very appealing to me, aren’t mass-appeal songs. 

The above tweet is somewhat true, and I think that’s the appeal of Modest Mouse to most fans. Isaac Brock doesn’t sing, he yelps. But he does it with a ferocity, an urgency, that makes you want to go along for whatever ride he is taking you on. That urgency is very present on Good News, and I fail to see how people don’t hear it. I think the ferocity is there, for the most part. It’s just that the songs are more singable, more accessible than on previous records. Old-school fans resent that accessibility. They want Modest Mouse to themselves, as if  they don’t belong to the masses.

After my ex left, I spent a lot of time playing the records he hated, Good News among them. Turning it up loud without fear of anger, without retreating to my headphones, felt freeing. And that freedom is what I now associate with the album. It’s why it remains a favorite, despite its ubiquity and naysayers.