Wednesday, Reclaiming Modest Mouse, and Brad's Best of 2023 So Far

It’s been a minute for the 6OGs, as we enjoy summer with our families and try not to wither in the heat.  But we’re back with heat of our own, still buzzing from a Father’s Day show by Wednesday, reclaiming our youth with a revisit of Modest Mouse (though reminded of why this is one of the two most disappointing bands of the modern era), and a review of OG Brad’s Top 10 of 2023 so far.

New album(s): Brad’s Top 10 so far.  Last time out, I used this space to do a quick survey of 10 great indie rock albums of recent months that are worth a listen (or 3).  Since it’s too hot for anyone to read three long reviews in one post, and there’s a lot to dive into in the two below, we’ll keep the lists going in this section:

1.       Rat Saw God by Wednesday - Just read Brian’s review below. This album just gets better every time you put it on.

2.       Island of Love by Island of Love - Just read my earlier review here.

3.       Maps by Billy Woods and Kenny Segal - Read my review of their last album here. Pitchfork’s 8.9 for Maps isn’t even over the top enough; there are so many great lines and moments on the album, but definitely don’t miss Danny Brown’s guest verse on Track 7.

4.       Attachment Styles by M(h)aol - Just read my earlier review here.

5.       Peace Loving People by Pardoner - The SF indie rock band has put out a perfect indie rock record, channeling a wide array of influences and making the 6OGs happy by hitting a bunch of 90s indie sounds perfectly (in this recent Bandcamp feature, they spend a lot of time name-checking 90s underground legends Polvo).

6.      EP by Anteek Recipes - Looking for an old school-sounding new hip-hop record in this 50th anniversary year of the genre’s birth? This has been the one for me all year.

7.       Keturah by Keturah - A remarkable sweep of sub-Saharan music and influences on this debut album from the Malawian singer. In Hebrew, “keturah” means incense, and this record brings in the feel of being swept away by just the right amount of that smell, before that annoying hackey-sacker either lights up more or starts talking.

8.       Western Cum by Cory Hanson - The former lead singer of Wand and past collaborator with garage rock hero Ty Segall, Cory Hanson has put together another genre-bending collection of songs that range from country to alt-country to The Replacements to hardcore, sometimes in the same song.

9.       Animals by Kassa Overall - There has been a lot of great hip-hop this year, but most of it is running together in my mind. Kassa Overall stands out for the instrumentation and varying flow he brings to the new record. Not to mention an incredible roster of features, from Danny Brown again to Shabazz Palaces to Laura Mvula to Nick Hakim to Vijay Iyer.

10.   Medicine by Orchestra Gold - Just read my earlier review here. (Brad)

Album from an upcoming/recent live show:  Rat Saw God by Wednesday.  If a band could be created in a lab specifically for the 6OGs (or rock critic Stephen Hyden), it would look and sound a lot like Wednesday.  The Asheville, NC-based band is a five-piece outfit fronted by lead singer Karly Hartzman and featuring tremendous riffs from lead guitarist MJ Lenderman (who released a 2022 solo album, Boat Songs, also a 6OG favorite – making 4 of our Best of 2022 lists).  Wednesday plays an electric mix of shoegaze and alt-country; think of Ride but coming out of the Carolinas instead of the UK.  Several of the 6OGs got to experience Wednesday live when they played DC’s Black Cat on June 18 while touring to support their newest album, Rat Saw God.  Safe to say that both the show and the album will be remembered among the year’s best.

Two of the standout tracks from Rat Saw God are “Chosen to Deserve” and “Quarry,” both of which featured in Wednesday’s setlist and also elicited an enthusiastic response from the crowd.  “Chosen to Deserve” leans heavily into the alt-country side of Wednesday’s sound, featuring some of Hartzman’s most personal and confessional lyrics.  “Quarry” veers more into a loud-quiet-loud shoegaze sound with descriptions of the seedier side of life that could be ripped from Craig Finn’s notebook (“Pulled guns and cocaine from the drywall wrapped in newspaper”).  On “Bath County,” Hartzman takes a cue from the Drive-By Truckers as she details some of the uglier sides of life in the South (“Heard someone died in the Planet Fitness parking lot / Fire trucks rolled in and people stood around / Hit ‘em with a dose of Narcan”), even going so far as to name-check the Truckers in the song. 

This theme continues on show opener “Turkey Vultures” (“There’s a sex shop off the highway / With a biblical name”) that starts contemplative and builds to a furious rage featuring some impressive guitar work from Lenderman.  The band brings it down a few levels on “Formula One,” another seemingly personal song (“I like sleeping with the lights on / You next to me watching Formula One”) dripping with a beautiful pedal steel guitar.  Album opener and absolutely killer live song “Hot Rotten Grass Smell” is a rager that smacks the listener in the face, all the more reinforced by the small breaks in the song.  Wednesday closed their show with “Bull Believer,” another blistering guitar track that references the video game Mortal Kombat while, at the end of the song, Hartzman agonizingly shrieks the game’s catchphrase, “Finish him.”  Album closer “TV in the Gas Pump” didn’t make the show’s setlist, but its lyrics paint a picture of every American town in 2023, name-checking Panera, Starbucks, and Dollar General, and the song ends on a quick bit of distortion that might be overkill for some other bands but fits Wednesday’s aesthetic perfectly.

Worth a quick mention – Wednesday’s opener was a band called Tenci, an indie-folk act from Chicago.  To put it kindly, they weren’t really my thing.  Reminded me of Tune-Yards.  If you were a fan of them (and I certainly wasn’t) check out Tenci.  But they were not for me.

I’m hardly the first to say this, but Rat Saw God represents Wednesday’s well-deserved breakout and is on the shortlist for my favorites of 2023.  And the Black Cat show was a blast from start to finish, with a setlist hitting songs from all of their albums and featuring some excellent on-stage banter, including a shout-out to Hartzman’s grandmother, who was in attendance that night (note to listeners of the Indiecast podcast – “Eddie from DC” was dead fucking wrong about Hartzman’s banter; it made a great show even better).

Whenever someone says that no one makes good rock music anymore, play Rat Saw God.  If this album can’t convince, then I don’t know what else to say. (Brian)

Album being rediscovered (at least 10 years old): The Moon & Antarctica by Modest Mouse.  I have long argued that Modest Mouse is in the running for steepest decline of the 2000s: a once-great, even legendary, indie/punk band that now (and for quite some time, actually) makes music that is unlistenable (Sleater-Kinney being the other contender).  For a band with an album in my Top 5 of all time (not the one that is the subject of this discussion, but the Lonesome Crowded West), their work in the 2000s has, to my ears, sucked so terribly and thoroughly that, for many years, I simply stopped listening entirely.  

But drawn in by an episode about the band on Bandsplain, I decided to throw on their debut album, This is a Long Drive for Someone with Nothing to Think About, in the office, and my colleague Michael perked up to ask what was playing.  Aware of only their hits from the 2000s, he had never given the band much time, and I quickly began proselytizing about their early work (which he had never listened to).  But I was mostly focused on those first two records and the various EP collections from the 1990s, as over time, even The Moon & Antarctica (TM&A), the band’s major label debut from June 2000, had merged with the dreck of the later albums, which drew in new fans but left me behind.

It is rare to be able truly to say, “no one else did or could sound like this band.”  Many bands or artists may have unique aspects: distinctive instrumentation or playing, a vocalist with singular lyrics or tone, song structures that are uncommon, production flourishes all their own, etc.  Usually, it’s just one or two of those. Maybe they do what everyone else can do, just better (see: The Clash, The Replacements, Uncle Tupelo, etc).  But in most cases, even if no one does sound like a certain band for one or more of those reasons, others could sound like them.  Sure, you know when a song by REM, Led Zeppelin, The Smiths, or most other great bands comes on, but if we’re honest, nothing about those bands is impossible to replicate; it’s just that they did it in a way that was fully their own and thus specifically great.  

Modest Mouse, at least on their early records through TM&A, is a rare band that combines all of the above, and then some, to become a band with a sound that is entirely unique and unto themselves.  Diving back into their early records remains a thrill for that reason – 25-30 years later, although there have been imitators to a degree, no one has really gotten close to the songs they produced, and it’s hard to see that anyone ever will.  You just need to listen to TM&A opening track, “3^rd Planet,” and think if you’ve ever heard a song that sounds like it (spoiler alert: you haven’t).  The elements on paper – lyrical self-loathing (including a lost child?) with a slight tinge of hope, alternating soft and loud playing and varying tempos, an initial acoustic riff that turns into a wall of sound and quiets again before the song ends – have all been done a zillion times, but the ingredients in the Modest Mouse recipe just result in something that comes out sounding like none of those other songs.  On one hand, the central line – “The universe is shaped exactly like the earth/If you go straight long enough, you’ll end up where you were” – feels like it could be taken from any number of artists or poets, but then again, not quite; at least no one else would write it as directly.  From singer/guitarist Isaac Brock’s off-key but earnest voice when delivering lines like those and his bending/curvy guitar riffs that just sound a note off from anyone else, to the blistering drumming of the late Jeremiah Green (who tragically passed away earlier this year from cancer, at age 45), and the out of the universe bass lines from Eric Judy that feel almost more melodic than the guitar – at their height, Modest Mouse produced songs that never get old, even after being on repeat for two hours.   

What I had forgotten is the incredible journey TM&A takes you on.  Tracks like “Dark Center of the Universe,” “The Stars Are Projectors,” and “Alone Down There” have the epic feel that centerpiece tracks on Modest Mouse’s earlier records (“Trailer Trash,” “Dramamine,” etc) have – the slow build, the lyrical flourishes (“Well, God said something but he didn’t mean it/Everyone’s life ends but no one ever completes it/Dry and wet ice, they both melt/And you’re equally cheated” from “Dark Center”), the exploding music that somehow also feels contained.  Then there are the quieter, or at least more singular in tone, tracks, such as “Gravity Rides Everything,” “Lives,” “Wild Packs of Family Dogs,” and “The Cold Part” that take the angst and sweeten it just a tad, even if just in the delivery.  Then there are just great straight-ahead (or at least as much as they got in this era) rocks songs like “Paper Thin Walls” and “Tiny Cities Made of Ashes,” the latter of which, as Bandsplain makes clear, helped ported the indie-dance era of the 2000s (but was not actualized as a song until Sun Kil Moon covered it; see below).  Even if Isaac makes multiple references to “fucking people over” in the lyrics, you never feel cheated as a listener, just grateful.       

And the core of why they have become unlistenable to me is that, starting with the 2004 follow-up to TM&A (Good News for People Who Like Bad News, though signs begin on the EP of TM&A session material, called Everywhere and His Nasty Parlour Tricks), which broke them into a mainstream audience (went platinum, got them on Saturday Night Live, multiple Grammy nominations, etc), they no longer sounded unique.  Their big hits from Good News, “Float On” and “Ocean Breathes Salty,” as well as from later albums, like “Dashboard” and “Lampshades on Fire,” are of course what tend to make hits hits – the edges are off, the formerly curvy or angular approaches to the playing are now just all nice, straight lines, the lyrical chances and adventures are played safe with simpler and far more breezy themes, the song structures are conventional.  It brought them millions of new fans and kept their career going likely much longer than producing songs like their first four, but they completely lost me (I’m sure that’s a deal Isaac Brock takes any day, and frankly I would, too).  The songs are fine, I guess, but for a band that made songs that got to your heart and shook you in completely unique ways, fine felt like a complete betrayal.

Put another way: I was never mad that the band sold music in 2003 (TM&A’s “Gravity Rides Everything”) to be used in a commercial for the Nissan Quest minivan; I was mad that they made music that sounded like it would be enjoyed most in a Nissan Quest minivan.

For many years, when I’ve wanted to hear Modest Mouse, I’ve given into my frustration with the band and turned instead to arguably the greatest covers album of all time, Sun Kil Moon’s Tiny Cities, which totally reimagined MM songs into acoustic gems (if nothing else, after listening to “Tiny Cities Made of Ashes,” please just listen to “Neverending Math Equation”), only further making the point how incredible the early songs are in their breadth and depth.  And without my realizing it, perhaps a whole generation has grown up only knowing the hits from the 2000s, imagining this band to be without the depth and wonder that excited indie rock fans, including me, of the 1990s.  I am grateful to my colleague Michael for being part of that generation but can only hope more of his fellow Gen Z’ers have a cranky old guy in their office suites revisiting the old stuff (Brad).