I was at the Modest Mouse show last night and it was definitely a mixed bag. It started off strong with Paper Thin Walls and some Good News tracks. The banjo and electric 12-string were cool on Bukowski. But Isaac Brock also felt the need to heckle the audience for requesting tried and true old songs.
“Yeah, we’ll play Cowboy Dan, only we’ll play it to the tune of Float On, and sing the words of Float On. How about that?”
Thanks, dick. Why don’t you also cater to the 16 year-olds in the audience that’ll forget you even exist when MTV doesn’t show your video any more.
And then there was the 20-minute meandering jam/bathroom break. I actually didn’t mind that so much because I had 4 quick beers at Rudy’s beforehand, and was still going iron bladder.
They finished with an extended jam on Dramamine, which is one of my favorites. Great song to jam on too, because it’s got such a simple riff.
All in all, they did around a 2 hour set, so at least I got my money’s worth. Now we just have to see if the new album is any good, and whether the vaunted Johnny Marr makes a noteworthy contribution. He didn’t really stand out at all last night.
In his defense, bands do show up with a setlist that they’ve rehearsed, and when you have 5 albums to work from it probably gets pretty annoying when people keep yelling out names of songs you wrote 15 years ago.
Hey dick, maybe issac didn’t want to play a greatest hits set, did you ever think of that? The fact that they played some hits from Good news is probably because it was their most popular album to date. In conclusion the majority of the audience would appreciate these songs more. Don’t get me wrong I like the older stuff better myself, but that doesn’t mean they shouldn,t play the newer songs more often.