BG's Top Ten Albums of 2004 - Number Three

Modest Mouse - Good News for People Who Love Bad News

We live in troubling times, my friends, and never has the world needed Modest Mouse’s brand of melancholic cynicism than it does right now. Thankfully, they have delivered. And how. While I can’t really say that Good News is their best album, I would have to think long and hard to come up with how they could’ve made a better one. By finding the perfect combination of elements from their last two albums, Issac Brock and the boys have produced some of the best songs of their career. "Bury Me With It" is classic Modest Mouse a la Lonesome Crowded West, while "Blame It On the Tetons" and "One Chance" both show the depth and maturity that they hinted at on The Moon and Antarctica. And then there's "Float On", a song so strong it doesn’t matter how many times it=s used as background music on Monday Night Football or played on the local alternative radio station in between Linkin Park and Evenscense, it's still amazing. To think that a song which is the embodiment of cautious optimism came from the same guy who not too long ago was singing about how he was "trying to drink away the part of the day that [he] cannot sleep away" is as unbelievable as, well, that same band being nominated for two Grammys. But, believe it or not, that's what’s happened and we are all the luckier for it.