Modest Mouse
No One’s First, and You’re Next (Epic)

If you’re one of the millions who liked Modest Mouse’s 2004 breakthrough album Good News for People Who Love Bad News, or its 2007 follow-up We Were Dead Before the Ship Even Sank, it’s hard to imagine you’ll be disappointed by the band’s latest. No One’s First, and You’re Next is an eight-song EP made up of cast-off tracks from those earlier records, most of them as sharp and inventive as anything that made the cut. So it’s virtually a sure bet—unless either Good News or We Were Dead marked the moment when you’d had your fill of the frenzied puppet show that is Isaac Brock’s vocal delivery. But we’ll get to that in a second.

Here, as before, the Issaquah, Washington–bred group widens the scope of the sound it began developing back in the mid ’90s—a swerving, guitar-driven approach filled with details which, like dented cogs, always seem about to seize up. Even “Autumn Beds”, one of the quieter, plainer songs on No One’s First, runs in chapters, starting out with cheery countryside fingerpicking and clucking banjo, and then halting repeatedly to change tone, as if it were a movie soundtrack compressed into three-and-a-half minutes. The chugging “History Sticks to Your Feet” lets a chiming loop roll like a broken toy across a surface of simple, buzzing chords, the angles of the tune constantly shifting and opening up new ground. “The Whale Song” spreads this dramatic strategy out over six minutes, slinking in with dark bass and a crowd of ghostly guitar-made shapes and then gradually growing so frantic and strained that it snaps into two marvellously clashing lines.

At points like this, you can hear the impact made by ex-Smiths ace Johnny Marr, Modest Mouse’s newest member. Marr is one of the most ego-free virtuosos ever to pick up a guitar, and his trademark combination of prettiness and force blends easily into Brock’s own idiosyncratic, direct playing. The fit is so natural that it even helps out on diversions like “Perpetual Motion Machine”, a clanking, squawking bit of carnival music featuring the Dirty Dozen Brass Band.

The only thing that weighs down No One’s First, making the minutes pass slower than they should, is Brock’s voice. He’s still writing some the most beautifully jaded lyrics around (“Just like being my own solar system, doing good things but then totally eclipse them,” he laments on the record’s opener, “Satellite Skin”). But the vocal cords he uses to deliver them have only two settings: an anxious, boylike warble and a panic-stricken bark that sounds as if he’s being chased around by a man with a fork. Luckily, nearly every other aspect of his band’s project is in full stride here.

Download This: “The Whale Song”