Modest Mouse to ring in Macworld | iWorld 2012 Images

Macworld | iWorld 2012 doesn’t officially open until Thursday, January 26, but Modest Mouse will be kicking off the expo the night before with a headlining concert at the Warfield, a few blocks away from the convention site at Moscone Center. Modest Mouse is one of the main draws of this year’s convention, and it stands at the front and center of the convention’s Music Experience. Corporate though it may be, Wednesday’s concert will be the band's first headlining show in San Francisco in a long while (previously, the band played Outside Lands 2009, but they prefer Oakland’s Fox Theatre over San Francisco venues for their Bay Area visits).





The band originally formed in Issaquah, WA, a mere half-an-hour away from Microsoft’s headquarters in Redmond. San Franciscans should be glad Modest Mouse has chosen to come down here to play to the cult of Apple.
Macworld | iWorld Vice-President and General Manager Paul Kent spoke effusively of the band. “Modest Mouse has become an indie rock standard and one of the few bands capable of treading the narrow path where massive popularity is possible without sacrificing their longtime fans," he said.

That massive popularity was a long time coming. Modest Mouse first gained a following behind the strength of their first two records, 1996’s "This is a Long Drive for Someone with Nothing to Think About" and 1997’s "The Lonesome Crowded West." These two LP are, in my opinion, two of the best indie-rock records of the 1990s. Their early works often evoke the lonely flat landscapes of the urban sprawl. Accordingly, the instrumentation was sparse, and the presentation lo-fi. The band played on those two LPs with a loose and earnest flair. Their sound during this stretch, to me, is timeless (and I was a late Mouse adopter from 2004). In 2000, Modest Mouse signed a deal with Epic Records. Their first release on their new label, "The Moon and the Antarctic," saw the band taking a creative step forward, this time with a greater emphasis placed on atmospherics.

For their first three albums, Modest Mouse operated as a power trio, but the band has ballooned to as many as six members at a time. Since 2004, they’ve been playing live with two drummers on stage. The growth in the band’s membership has coincided with the growth of the band’s profile.

A band’s sound is bound to change over the span of two decades. Modest Mouse has largely traded in their needling guitar heroics and jammier tendencies for thicker and quicker slabs of danceable rock. One thing has stayed constant for Modest Mouse, though—Isaac Brock’s unmistakable voice punctuates all of Mouse’s songs with a manic energy. Brock relies heavily on vocal backtracking, creating a raucous chorus out of his singular voice. He sounds drunk more often than not, and that’s not an indictment at all. In fact, Brock’s vocals never fails to rouse listeners from their sleepy daytime lives. “Gotta go to work, gotta go to work, gotta have a job!” Brock exclaims mockingly on “Custom Concern” off of the band’s debut album, his disenfranchisement ringing clear.

Modest Mouse reached many ears for the first time through another corporate avenue in the form of a Nissan minivan commercial. They licensed out their song “Gravity Rides Everything,” which features warped back-masked guitar followed by pensive strumming. You might be familiar with the verse, “Oh, gotta see, gotta know right now, what’s that riding on your everything.” The cries of “sellout!” have long died down since then, so show attendees and fans alike should enjoy Modest Mouse’s set without worries of being condescended upon.