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We Were Dead Before The Ship Even Sank | Modest Mouse
Epic | March 17th

Review by Tom Fairman

Website | Epic Records
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Sounds like … Franz Ferdinand with personality disorders.

Modest Mouse, fronted by the enigmatic Issac Brock, have returned with their first long player since 2004’s mainstream success, Good News For People Who Love Bad News, and have thus entered into an era of their career where they’ll find every Tom, Seth and Mischa scouring the tracks of We Were Dead Before The Ship Even Sank for the next foot-stomping Float On follow up.

We Were Dead opens strongly with March Into The Sea, a frenetic portrait of complex commercialised modern life that echoes the bands work on 1998’s The Moon & Antarctica –“We all stumbled round tangled up in the cords from our phones, V.C.R. and our worldly woes.” The track, which sets the tone for the rest of the album, builds to a crescendo that gives way to first single Dashboard, which seems to answer Float On’s “we’ll float on, good news is on the way” with “we scheme and we scheme but we always blow it.” James Mercer of The Shins provides back up vocals on the infectious We Have Everything, and the 8-minute Spitting Venom remains strong despite varying between sea-shanty, blistering rock and indie groove.

No artist deserves all of their post-‘hit’-art to be endlessly compared and graded against their ‘breakthrough’ work, yet this is unfortunately inevitable. We Were Dead, while perhaps being slightly overlong, not as intriguing as The Moon & Antarctica, or as easily accessible as Good News, should be seen for what it is, and that is a strong, intelligent album in the arc of Modest Mouse’s career. Here they have proven their ability to write irresistibly enjoyable dance-rock songs that bear a razors edge that quietly rips at modern life, only revealed when the lyric booklet is pried open – suitably mimicking the commercialized culture they so often criticize.

7 out of 10