Weekend Listening: Modest Mouse covering Buddy Holly’s “That’ll be the day”
We haven't heard fresh material from Modest Mouse in a while - some hardcore fans might say that's a good thing. Still, I've caught glimpses that have pointed in a new direction which makes me optimistic like this cover of the Buddy Holly classic, "That'll Be The Day." It's such an inventive take on the source material, capturing the creepy message of the song.
After the jump is old footage of Buddy Holly and The Crickets performing the original and a write up I did of Modest Mouse as they relate to environmental themes. They will be at the Knitting Factory Concert House in Spokane on May 28th with special guests Talkdemonic. It's worth the price of admission.
Given their recent success, it’s funny to think Modest Mouse has been kicking around since 1992. They hailed from Issaquah - a sprawling, cul-de-sacked nightmare which formed a dystopian and claustrophobic vision on earlier records they’ve never been able to match. Witness their quaint commentary on consumer culture: “Let’s all have another Orange Julius/Thick syrup standing in lines/The malls are the soon to be ghost towns/So long, farewell, goodbye…well do you need a lot of what you got to survive?” on “Teeth Like God’s Shoeshine.” That left quite the impression on my wide-eyed teenage self in the Pacific Northwest as Wal-Martians attacked, nature was destroyed for bankrupt golf courses, or, as the funny lyrics say in “Novocaine Stain,”… “More housing developments go up/Named after the things they replace/So welcome to Minnow Brook/And welcome to Shady Space/And it all seems a little abrupt/No I don’t like this change of pace.”
On the aptly titled second album “Lonesome Crowded West,” frontman Isaac Brock spoke of, and perhaps to, “modest mouse-like people,” a line he cribbed from Virginia Woolf. These were characters like Cowboy Dan, who goes to the reservation, drinks and gets mean because he “didn’t move to the city/the city moved to me/and I want out desperately.” Brock was stricken with rural dementia and this violent composition speaks for inhabitants who were displaced by growth while everybody looked the other way.
