Modest Mouse:
No One's First, And You're Next

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The house that Mouse built

Modest Mouse’s crossover superstardom is something of a misnomer. For all the much-deserved acclaim and assays at catchy songwriting seen since 2004’s breakout LP Good News For People Who Love Bad News, there’s been nary a deviation from their brand of idiosyncratic introspection. So it goes with No One’s First, And You’re Next, an eight-song EP of already-released material poached from their last two albums’ recording sessions. Like previous B-side collections Building Nothing Out of Something and Everywhere and His Nasty Parlour Tricks the material provides an illuminating—if hodgepodge—account of the band’s sonic trajectory.

No One’s First kicks off with radio-bait “Satellite Skin”, a country-tinged rocker that plays on the point-counterpoint between Isaac Brock’s quavering vocals and a plodding guitar riff. Though the track lacks the immediacy of previous singles, the muted pace offers space for melancholic rumination that resolves into devastating release: “Just like being my own solar system / doing good things but then totally eclipse them / oh what’s the use oh what the hell”. Brock further levies his barbaric yawp on the manic Good News throwback “Guilty Cocker Spaniels” and fuzzed-out space jam “History Sticks to Your Feet”, asking existential questions and offering ripostes of piercing ennui in the same breath.

There’s also a representative sample of the band’s forays into sonic weirdness, like the rockabilly sea-shanty hybrid “King Rat”. The methodical “Perpetual Motion Machine” plays like a dystopic big-band cacophony of groaning brass and clacking cowbells as Brock moans that “everyone wants to be a perpetual motion machine / we all try harder as the days run out”. The EP’s 33-minute runtime spans years of musical growth; it’s a schizophrenic skein of musical threads in which each track stands on its own merits. More importantly, it’s proof positive that the nail-biting about “going mainstream” is unfounded. Modest Mouse is the same surreal upstart it's always been: ever ready to defy conventions—especially its own.

Listen to Modest Mouse's "Satellite Skin" from No One's First, And You're Next: