Modest Mouse

Loneliness in America is at an all-time high. As the virtual world becomes more and more entertaining, we're abandoning the real world in droves. Instead of going to concerts, we're watching webcasts; instead of meeting our friends, we're instant messaging them.

It's this sort of increasing alienation that runs through Modest Mouse's strangely uplifting The Moon and Antarctica. It's no lost irony that the two most desolate places ever visited by humans provide the setting for this treatise on the state of the soul today.

Singer/guitarist Issac Brock's lyrics weave tales of fleeting love ("Your heart felt good") and paranoid visions of the future ("We're heading down the road to tiny cities made of ashes/I'm gonna punch you in the face/I'm gonna punch you in the glasses") with nonsensical schizophrenic ramblings. The Radiohead-esque syncopated rhythms and the choppy, biting guitars add another layer of uneasiness to the songs.

Brock's refusal to buckle under the weight of his vast loneliness elevates the album to a level of intrigue and hope. On "Stars Are Projectors," he sings, "All the stars are projectors/Projecting our lives down to this planet Earth." Such leaps of boldness seem to imply that Modest Mouse see the The Moon and Antarctica not as enormous stretches of emptiness but as great places waiting to be conquered.

This sort of wide-eyed, almost childlike approach is rare in today's cynical music world. Modest Mouse's ambitions lead them to take chances that sometimes succeed and sometimes fail on this album, but the spirit of this music recalls a time when we would look at the starry sky and imagine anything.

-By Robert Kelley