(I don’t often fling reviews into the digital ether but when I do, it’s because I am shamelessly smitten with an album and I want everyone else to know about it, too.)

The Golden Casket, Modest Mouse
Released: 25 June 2021

Even with this album’s release coinciding with a long weekend at the shore with friends, by the end of June, I knew exactly what my Spotify Wrapped will reflect this year: that I listened to new Modest Mouse to an absolutely unhealthy, mathematically improbable extent. But, hell, if we’re being completely honest, I did already know that by the time “The Sun Hasn’t Let,” the third and final single preceding the album’s release, first hit my ears.

Modest Mouse is such an unusual band for Younger Me to have both fallen and stayed in love with, genre-defying but accessible, musically experimental but lyrically familiar. And really only having discovered them months before their breakout album changed everything made for an odd introduction as I tried to reconcile their first three much more roughly hewn, riskier records with the admittedly poppier Good News for People Who Love Bad News, which I shamelessly adored decidedly harder than its predecessors at first blush.

I spent… more than one day listening to Modest Mouse’s seven studio albums, one compilation and some assorted singles in chronological order and, hooooly fuckbars, what a face-melting experience and wild ride that was every time. Binge-charting their progression from noisy, arrhythmic music and indiscernible yelling that sounded like the aural approximation of an abstract painting to a gradually more polished, more accessible, but still-unlike-anything-else-in-popular-music sound was just flat-out fun. There isn’t an era of this band that I don’t love, and it’s an absolute treat to hear whispers, clangs and cacophonous echoes of the old staples that have evolved since Modest Mouse’s early days to remain relevant among their progression of defining hallmarks and stay true to what differentiates them from the rest.

And, honestly, I’m just acutely grateful that frontman Isaac Brock is still around and making music; the fact that I’m still enjoying the music he creates is a bonus.

What I love about listening to Modest Mouse is kind of what I love about reading Bukowski: It’s presented in this raw and jagged package that might be ostensibly off-putting, but if you give it just a little bit of time, effort, and good faith, you uncover an absolutely impossible amount of heart, feeling, and a willingness to be awed by the world, as ugly and beautiful and unforgiving and limitlessly awe-inspiring as it is. The Moon & Antarctica begins with the line “Everything that keeps me together is falling apart” and proceeds to observe that “the universe is shaped exactly like the earth / If you go straight long enough you’ll end up where you were.” The aforementioned Good News is teeming with the optimism of someone who’s not used to looking on the bright side but giving it a valiant effort anyway: You’ve got the immensely popular “Float On” observing that “Bad news comes, don’t you worry even when it lands / Good news will work its way to all them plans;” then you have my favorite song from the album, “The View,” just casually drop in one of my favorite subtle proclamations of love with “Life, it rents us / And, yeah, I hope it put plenty on you,” a line that makes my heart swell and my voice catch with equal likelihood.

There are more, of course, but The Golden Casket does its damnedest to put them all to shame with some of the most overtly affectionate, utterly content lyrics Brock ever threw against his frantic melodies. And while it’s hard to talk about one album when it’s so personally intertwined with the pantheon of albums preceding it, there is so much about The Golden Casket that I just want to squeal about because it has elicited a downright teenybopperesque degree of enthusiasm from my terminally no-chill heart.

It comes growling out of the gate with “Fuck Your Acid Trip,” radiating that resignation of having bought the ticket for the whole tumultuous, hallucinatory ride, like, nine fucking hours ago, man, and the company you’ve been sharing the same LSD roller coaster with got off the same wavelength when you all started peaking at wholly varying times and now your violently clashing schedules brought reality rudely back to the party and the harsh light of dawn has you feeling every second of the 31 hours you’ve been awake. This isn’t the place for a story about that time my husband white-knuckled his way back to a friend’s house to drop off two of our evening compadres after a detour to some modern-day hippie enclave included some ill-advised (but still fun as fuck) candy-stacking as my typically peacekeeping persona yielded to threatening our passengers with my old self’s thundering rage if they spoke one word and broke poor hub’s desperate concentration, but it’s sure as shit where my brain goes every time I sardonically, knowingly giggle over how keenly I feel this song. Because there is some dimly hilarious dichotomy marrying a seemingly carefree night of party drugs to the almost claustrophobic responsibility of just wanting to go home already and knowing you won’t feel right again ’til you’re there.

And then it launches into “We Are Between,” one of the album’s trio of singles that I shamelessly, repeatedly devoured until I had an entire album to roll around in. It anthemically immortalizes the space between the best parts and the worst parts, between the dust and the stars, where life happens and blossoms and fades and rebounds and returns to a baseline existence propelling the everyday forward, a simple but effective and energetic meditation on how the ups and downs coexist and form the nebulous middle where most stories happen and most lives are lived, a theme that’s seamlessly carried into the next track, “We’re Lucky.”

The whole album, perhaps unsurprisingly given its title and cover art, is an exploration of the hyphen between life and death and the tilting balance between the forces at odds throughout its range and the small moments that add up to a life well-lived.

There’s evidence that maybe just doing is living in “Walking and Running.”

There’s “Wooden Soldiers” closing out its emotionally scattershot musings with the achingly gorgeous sentiment of appreciating the beauty and peace of a here and now where “just being here being you’s enough for me,” a line that still gives me goosebumps many, many listens later.

There’s an entire fucking party album condensed into a four-minute, 24-second song in the aforementioned “The Sun Hasn’t Left,” which finds there’s plenty to enjoy just among the scraps, especially if you delight in the inherent mystery every person is to every other one and the endless exploration of infinite worlds such a realization blows wide open: “We’re not so bereft, so here’s a bell that still rings true / There’s still something left, there’s still something left for you / You’re not wrong, things are a mess / But there’s still something left.”

There’s even “Lace Your Shoes,” wherein Brock itemizes all the ways he can’t wait to find out what kind of person his youngest child is, how they’ll do things, how they’ll interpret the world, how they’ll summit every milestone along the way. Not having kids myself, I find myself skipping otherwise really lovely odes to musicians’ children, like The Decemberists’ “12/17/12” and Andrew McMahon’s “Cecilia and the Satellite,” unless I’m in the right mood. But The Golden Casket came out barely a month before one of my oldest friends officially became a mom, and this song admittedly took on a whole different meaning as I considered it in the context of a little one who’s destined to become a person I adore even if his personality is still gonna be cooking and settling into its basic shape for years to come. Beyond personal associations, though, it’s kind of awesome to hear the same guy who sang about shit in one’s cut marvelling at this little human he is positively smitten with.

But then there’s “Never Fuck a Spider on the Fly” immediately following, a strongly worded indictment of and warning to internet trolls and other all-edge-no-point shit-stirrers, observing with sneering confidence and shouting from the moral high ground about how often toxic negativity consumes its host.

And while the album winds down satisfyingly enough, it’s the antepenultimate song that really clinches the whole thing for me. “Leave a Light On” is as sunny, welcomimg and affectionate as a song about houses and homes in all their forms oughtta be, and is just as fittingly chock-full of beautiful sentiments, too. Plus, it’s got some of my favorite lyrics on an album spilling over with great lines: “Your house is inside my heart / And your heart’s where my house is.”

The Golden Casket, somehow, is both a natural evolution and a surprising turn, a meditative maturation and a more restrained return to a familiar form, an authentic celebration and a sobering observation. No matter what it is at any given moment, though, its beating heart is those thoughts of home and love and finding the one place and person you’re certain of in an increasingly uncertain, delicately tenuous world, that one guaranteed constant through all the good, the bad and everything between.