Are You Dead or Are You Sleeping?

Modest Mouse - Good News for People Who Love Bad News

Sony, 2004

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Seems like I comment a lot on production. It's important. The use of production in music is like a brushstroke in painting or cooking method in cuisine or the use of simile in this very long sentence.

The production in Good News is backed off. There are layers, but very rarely too polised guitars dominate the mix. It's more intricate but the intricacy seems to come from a mosaic of simply-toned sounds. The guitars are scratchy or acoustic, the vocals are thin and sort of lispy. Unless they're screamed, and then they're just thin. The only thing that jumps way out in the mix is that dominant bass drum - used sparingly throughout the whole disc - that kicks in about halfway through the first track. Lots of other instruments (real musical instruments like horns and strings, as opposed to synth or found sounds) fill in the gaps left by Modest Mouse's usual thin sound.

All this jumble creates rhythm but that rhythm only goes so far. It's not rocky and it's not dancy. It's just musical. It goes well under what seems to be the main focus, the melody. And the melodies are good, fairly catchy without being annoyingly poppy.

All this, working well with the fact that the songs are consistently good and paced well over the course of the album, make it a pretty good listen overall. And while I might not like it more than The Moon and Antarctica, I certainly see it as easier to get all the way through in one sitting.