We Were Dead Before the Ship Even Sank Modest Mouse
Epic
If you expected Johnny Marr's full-time membership in Modest Mouse to morph Isaac Brock's dystopian mish-mash rock into romantic art-pop à la the Smiths — forget about it. Brock stays true to his semi-unhinged, kitchen-sink self on We Were Dead Before the Ship Even Sank, enveloping Marr's guitar excellence into the Modest Mouse mix without so much as a hiccup. The songs keep their shape-shifting time signatures and tempos — audio Franken-hybrids where melody and dissonance get mashed together like multimedia artworks.
With the exception of radio-friendly fare like "Missed the Boat" or "Dashboard" — two likely singles candidates where Marr's Smiths legacy figures most prominently — the twists and turns can be dizzying, so too the smorgasbord of instrumentation and layered arrangements. Some songs morph from horn-driven pop confections into madman sea shanties, others from ominous dirges into abrasive blasts of robot math-rock — sometimes they sample from all of the above.
So We Were Dead sounds at first like a mess, songs and narratives shattered by life's injustices and Brock's contrariness into too many shards to reassemble. Soon enough, though, an internal Modest Mouse logic takes over, and nearly every element finds its rightful place in Brock's weird universe. 3.5 stars —John Schacht
Arrivals & DeparturesTHE ICICLES
Microindie
The sunny sounds of '60s pop are reinvented with care and precision on Arrivals & Departures, the second LP by The Icicles, a female-fronted quintet from Grand Rapids, Mich. Smoothly strummed guitars and soothing keyboards (including a Moog) whisk the listener away to a place where school crushes and hot nights spent holding hands come to life. It's a fitting backdrop for the lived-in beauty of Gretchen DeVault's vocals, and her lyrics make this disc truly special. The singer/protagonist is not a naïve pop tart but a fun-loving young woman who sings "La Ti Da" one minute but then tells her boyfriend "You had your chance and you lost it fast/ I told you a hundred times what it takes to be mine." On Arrivals & Departures, one imagines what it would've sounded like if a contemporary woman — rather than the mostly male scribes — penned the songs recorded by the '60s girl groups that sang about blind devotion. 4 stars —Wade Tatangelo
My Heart Has a Wish That You Would Not GoAEROGRAMME
Sonic Unyon
Scotland's Aerogramme eschew the loud/soft/loud maelstroms of their previous Mogwai-influenced recordings on My Heart, opting for tightly crafted melodic statements still fraught with dynamic tension. The songs sound like lush, synth-driven '80s new romantica (think Talk Talk or Ultravox) given heft by the darker keyboards-and-guitars drama of, say, indie contemporaries like The Standard. Only on the saccharine "Finding a Light" does singer Craig B's voice and sentiment cross the line into fey; otherwise, My Heart beats beautifully. 3.5 stars —JS
Living With the LivingTED LEO AND THE PHARMACISTS
Touch and Go
After delivering the sprawling, word-crammed masterpiece Hearts of Oak in 2003, Ted Leo and band cut back on their direct-to-the-people, election-year burner Shake the Sheets in 2004. Concision reigned, with Leo's wailing falsetto compressed into tight indie-punk-pop songs. The disc was predictably winning, but I had to wonder if Leo had bagged his rambunctiousness for good. Living with the Living is a rebuke to such musings; Leo has handed over his most promiscuous album yet. "A Bottle of Buckie" has a full-blown Irish breakdown, a sound Leo had merely flirted with before. "The Unwanted Things" is head-bobbing reggae, with a surprisingly appropriate vocal turn. "Bomb.Repeat.Bomb" actually sounds like a screamo parody. Always inspirational lyrically and ethically, Leo makes sure to keep it up on the musical tip as well. 4 stars —Cooper Levey-Baker
This article appears in Mar 21-27, 2007.