The Lonesome Crowded West

Less than a decade after opening an album with the nauseating lines, “From the top of the ocean/To the bottom of the sky, goddamn/Well, I get claustrophobic,” Modest Mouse penned the cloyingly upbeat “Float On,” a song whose optimism sells itself on a hopelessly buoyant guitar line and a couple of snares. That song, and the myth of positivity it can’t quite package as truth, announced a Modest Mouse that had put The Lonesome Crowded West behind them. Sure, Good News for People Who Love Bad News had sad or depraved moments (“Bury Me With It” and “Bukowski” come to mind), but the desolate landscape traced by the first ten seconds of “Teeth Like God’s Shoeshine” is nowhere to be seen in 2004 Modest Mouse’s salty sea-sides and rolling hills. This essay is not about Good News for People Who Love Bad News, but it pays to have context. That Isaac Brock ended up composing a song as jaw-droppingly upbeat as “Float On” serves only to exaggerate the depths of The Lonesome Crowded West’s craters, the weirdness of its metaphysics.

That opening line, again: “From the top of the ocean/To the bottom of the sky/Well, I get claustrophobic.” There doesn’t really leave much room to live, does there? The characters of The Lonesome Crowded West are constantly pushed around, squeezed into infinitesimal line segments, warped until they can’t recognize themselves. Brock’s introductory salvo reveals that, despite its confines, this world will be presented on no one’s terms but his own. The overly long song (and album) titles point to a sort of indescribability, a recognition of the insurmountable barriers Brock must face if he is to truly describe his claustrophobia. (What a sentence! No wonder this band drives some people crazy.)

The most straightforward answer is American late capitalism. The man with “teeth like God’s shoeshine” is, somewhat obviously, a deceitful and exploitive salesman who represents—and facilitates—the crumbling of the world Brock shouts at and about. The lyrics of this song are too multitudinous to discuss without either missing a revelation or erroneously placing the “genius” label on Isaac Brock (the chorus alone predicts the decline of the American shopping mall while pointing to the isolation that capitalism simultaneously produces and exploits), so instead I’m going to talk about those guitars. They start screeching before “Teeth Like God’s Shoeshine” even begins, and when they sparkle and shimmer during the song’s sublime chorus, they almost trick you into believing that their menacing fangs are far in the rearview. It seems disingenuous to call whatever this is a “riff,” seeing as it constantly trips over and reinvents itself in order to keep up with whatever vitriol Isaac Brock is spitting. When the Issaquah native talks about selling one’s conscience and buying new friends with the money, those guitars make it sound like a modest proposal. The guitars twirl around simple arpeggios and throw themselves into the fray of the song’s bridge. As the resigned last verse sighs itself into existence, they chime all around Brock’s half-singing, reminding you that once you’ve bought and sold all you can, all that’s left to do is yell.

The album is filled with inessential moments—overly meandering outros (I’m looking at you, “Trucker’s Atlas”), crushing choruses that lose their punch after ad nauseum repetition (“Convenient parking is way back, way back” starts to feel a bit less insightful after three minutes)—but losing these moments would mean losing a part of what it means to be so caught up in, so downtrodden by, capitalism and the towers that loom over the album’s patchwork cover. Did Isaac Brock really think “it’s all nice on ice, alright” was a profound enough statement to close out (again and again) this masterpiece of an album? I’m willing to bet not; those frantic drums that shut him up are proof. Floating on is not an option here—the only way out is to wade through the shit and grime that populates the lonesome crowded west.

So, what the fuck is going on with “Cowboy Dan”? What does it even mean to be a “major player in the cowboy scene”? And why does Brock shift between third-, first-, and second-person narration as if his story were somehow an autobiographical self-help guide? The song requires a good bit of disbelief to be suspended in order to remain effective. Of course, you could just hope that Isaac Brock will shut up long enough for you to bask in its chirping guitars, unremittent tambourine, and loping bassline—but you’d miss a huge piece of the puzzle along the way. If you’ll excuse the corniness, Cowboy Dan is all of us—he is anyone living under a capitalism that we didn’t ask for, one we are all tricked into loving. “He didn’t move to the city, the city moved to me/And I want out desperately,” Brock screams, acknowledging with a wink that Cowboy Dan’s colonial enterprise moved in on Native Americans in the first place. Cowboy Dan perpetuates the cycle of oppression that began long before the city moved in on “his” turf, and his plight pummels us when Brock tosses off the observation that “every time you think you’re walking, you’re just moving the ground.” The God that Cowboy Dan tries to kill when he “fires a rifle in the sky/And says, ‘God if I have to die, you will have to die’” is clearly unkillable and likely not a god at all. Cowboy Dan is trapped in a world that sacrifices human life for cities built on top of malls built on top of farms built on top of indigenous land, a world he knows much less about than he would like to admit.

But Cowboy Dan is not all that this album has to offer, and “Trailer Trash” is proof. “Trailer Trash” could very easily be one of the sweetest songs ever written, and Modest Mouse pull out every stop into making us wish it were. “Eating snowflakes with plastic forks/And a paper plate, of course/You think of everything,” the song opens, reveling in a childlike sincerity in which love is still an unknown and beautiful thing. Of course, Brock has to ruin it for us, immediately singing, “Short love with a long divorce/And a couple of kids, of course/They don’t mean anything.” When I hear this song I am always drawn back to Built To Spill’s “Twin Falls,” another song about losing childhood innocence and wide-eyed affection to the march of time and ostensible progress (written, incidentally, by a band whom Modest Mouse has been frequently—and unfairly—accused of ripping off). Both songs turn the notion of upwards mobility on its head, with “Twin Falls” lamenting (despite its half-convincing conclusion, “But that don’t bother me”) the lives left behind in a move away from home, and “Trailer Trash” revealing that a lack of “motivation” is far from the only factor that allows poverty’s scars to persist.

Both of these songs’ eccentricities are undeniably effective—“Twin Falls” in its brevity, “Trailer Trash” in its dynamics—and “Trailer Trash” stands as a turning point in The Lonesome Crowded West (not coincidentally, I assume, at the album’s halfway point): a transition from character studies like “Lounge (Closing Time)” and “Doin’ The Cockroach” to the bracing interiority of “Polar Opposites” and “Bankrupt on Selling.” Clearly, there are exceptions; the narrator of “Heart Cooks Brain” (a strange, pieced-together non-song) is obsessed with their own organs, while “Truckers Atlas” is about truckers at large, not Brock’s own experiences with driving. However, treating “Trailer Trash” as a milestone in The Lonesome Crowded West serves us well, illuminating an artificial dichotomy that capitalism necessitates. As mentioned before, this dichotomy relies on a deeply capitalist alienation, one that can be mostly boiled down to a self/other distinction. Karl Marx, writing in 1844 that capitalism estranges its workers from their “species-being” (Gattungswesen) and in turn from other subjects, paved the way for critiques of the ways capitalism seeps into our understanding of our own humanity. Rather than subjects acting communally within the context of a larger society, we are predisposed to view ourselves as distinct, atomized Cartesian individuals separated from, unable to relate to, all others.

Isaac Brock was far from the first (or most angry) person to rail against this alienation as it relates to daily life under capitalism, but The Lonesome Crowded West stands as a uniquely compelling document to the devastating effects of such estrangement. Dividing the album into its two halves, we experience the west’s microcosmic peculiarities first through the perspectives of a cinematographer, a cowboy, a lawyer on an Amtrak; and next through the mind of the narrator who supposedly represents Brock himself. This division grows increasingly uneasy until it becomes nearly impossible to sit with on “Bankrupt on Selling,” in which Brock claims, “I’ve seen through ‘em all…/Seen through most everything/All the people you know were the actors.” In The Lonesome Crowded West’s penultimate track, Brock’s I-told-you-so cynicism reduces all the album’s characters to actors willing to “sell off your soul/For a set of new wings and anything gold.” Of course, Brock is literally referring to angels here, but given his thoroughly examined atheism, it stands to reason that he’s actually talking about people on Earth. Under Brock’s distrust, the characters on the album’s first half are bulldozed to rubble and the introspection of “Trailer Trash” and beyond is all that’s left. However, being so fully estranged from that which makes him human (“I’m trying to drink away the parts of the day that I cannot sleep away,” he proclaims on “Polar Opposites), there is little solace in his own company. These divisions are artificial precisely because both the narrator and all those around them are experiencing an identical lonesome, crowded west. The self-defeating narrator of “Polar Opposites” is facing the exact same circumstances as the unnamed occupants of “Convenient Parking”’s parking lots: the emptiness that we can use no word other than “bankrupt” to describe under capitalism. Where this shared plight might be expected to provide solidarity, it instead fosters resentment and division: exactly what allows capitalism to continue functioning.

It seems strange that the same band who would dedicate an entire album to capitalism’s pillaging of the American west would, just seven years later, bounce along under the optimism of “We got fired on exactly the same day/Well, we’ll float on; good news is on the way.” It certainly seemed strange to me—until I looked a bit closer at The Lonesome Crowded West’s conclusion, the transcendent “Styrofoam Boats/It’s All Nice on Ice, Alright.” The song’s opening lines are telling:

“Well, all's not well

But I'm told that it'll all be quite nice

You'll be drowned in boots like mafia

But your feet will still float like Christ's

And I'll be damned

They were right

I'm drowning upside down

My feet afloat like Christ’s.”

Optimism here is quite literally turned on its head, with Brock pointing to the emptiness of nearly any promise under capitalism: you’ll still be drowned, but you’ll be told it’ll be alright (and technically, you aren’t being lied to). Later in the song we are told, via a man whose telephone rings whenever someone prays, that “God takes care of himself, and you of you.” Hope is an act of selfishness—a selfishness we would be unwise to ignore. Maybe, then, “Float On” is that selfishness turned outward, an acknowledgment of suffering that attempts to define its bounds. In this sense, “Float On” is resigned in exactly the same way as The Lonesome Crowded West: pain is inescapable, it argues; humans are only capable of processing it. Where “Float On” falls short, however, is in attacking the source of that pain, a source screamed at and kicked throughout The Lonesome Crowded West.

The Lonesome Crowded West aches with empathy, burdened by the weight of existence. Its characters do not jump off the page, because they are too tired or too busy trying to kill God. Released shortly after Rage Against The Machine’s self-titled debut, it functions as a much more effective critique of capitalism precisely because of its weariness. Its riffs are sloppy rather than precise; its stories draining rather than invigorating. Maybe it makes bad protest music, but it sure as hell makes good music to pray to God to.

Claire HeinzerlingMay 21, 20201 Comment