Cover for "The Lonesome Crowded West" by Modest Mouse
I don’t remember how I found Modest Mouse, and maybe that part doesn’t matter. I just remember how I felt: lonely, disconnected, achy in that way only teenagers on the precipice of young adulthood can ache.
It was almost winter, and everything was crisping up and preparing for death. I trodded up and down the roadside, shapeless in layered flannels, and gave myself windburn.
I had no destination in mind; I would simply walk as far as the grass would take me, pretending I had some greater purpose. Occasionally, I’d listen to music.
I’m on my way to God don’t know
My brain’s the burger, and my heart’s the coal
I’m trying to get my head clear
I push things out through my mouth
I get refilled through my ears
“Heart Cooks Brain,” by Modest Mouse
“Heart Cooks Brain,” an ode to emotions dominating logic. The song sounded the way I felt: lumbering, wind-chapped and just a little pathetic. There was a thread of humor there, too, a shock of self-deprecation highly attractive to my melancholic teenage self.
The song came from Modest Mouse’s sophomore album, “The Lonesome Crowded West,” listed by Pitchfork as one of the greatest albums of the 1990s.
It’s a long album — with a runtime of over an hour — and despite its various stylistic shifts, it manages to maintain a cultivated sense of honest disillusionment throughout.
I think of dried out autumn leaves and the scent of car exhaust, or clumps of fur falling off a squirrel carcass. Ephemeral things. An orange sun dragging across a bleached-bone sky. The ineliminable passage of time. Nostaglia like a knife through your ribs.
When you’re a teenager, misery feels eternal. Time flows like concrete. Everything smarts like you’ve rubbed yourself raw with pumice. You put on eyeliner and pierce your own ears and buy a digicamera, because all of these things are Acts of Self-Actualization and they’re the only things you can do that seem to matter in your state of semi-powerlessness.
You’re a kid-but-not-quite, teetering on the precipice of ego death, writhing in your ill-fitting skin. You’re barely autonomous, and no one understands you, so you commune with radio waves. You look for salvation in strange places and in strange music. The act of listening transforms into the art of ritual and you keep the magic to yourself so no one can steal it.
Live in trailers with no class
Goddamn, I hope I can pass
High school means nothing
Taking heartache with hard work
Goddamn, I am such a jerk
I can’t do anything
“Trailer Trash,” by Modest Mouse
My friends didn’t “get” Modest Mouse, and I didn’t bother trying to make them understand. Sure, everybody knew “Float On,” but the band’s other stuff? Too abstract. Too weird.
Maybe they were right. Isaac Brock’s penchant for colorful metaphor — (“eating snowflakes with plastic forks“) — and reedy, sometimes staggering voice wasn’t for everyone. Especially in “The Lonesome Crowded West.”
The album wore many hats. Sometimes it was plain indie, slow-paced and stripped down (“Out of Gas“). Other times, it was almost punk (“Sh– Luck”) or straight-up folk (“Jesus Christ Was an Only Child“).
The multitextural quality of the album was one of its principal appeals. It wasn’t a cohesive narrative, per se, but it was like an impressionist painting; stepping back from the flurry of discordant brushstrokes revealed a harmonious picture.
Life gets lonelier when you’re an adult. The energy to sustain social relationships, let alone make new ones, is often far too finite. It often seems unsurmountable.
Over the summer, I moved to the country. As I puttered away from the city and through miles and miles of farmland, I felt lonelier than ever. Familiar landscapes and familiar people melted into sprawls of tobbacco fields and sunbleached barns.
In the first few weeks of the new semester, I spent these drives near tears, languishing in the agony of complete and utter solutide. My chest ached like a bruise. I felt as frivolously miserable as a teenager with a bad haircut. I was borderline inconsolable, on the verge of total breakdown.
So naturally, I cranked up the radio.
Out of gas, out of road
Out of car, I don’t know how I’m gonna go
I had a drink the other day
My opinions were like kittens, I was giving them away
“Out of Gas,” by Modest Mouse
The feeling of comfort I felt as a teenager returned as the album progressed. I hummed the chords as I drove farther and farther from the city. The lyrics were tired like I was tired, but the beat’s energy lured me away from that Edge of Young Adult Madness and into a state of tacit acceptance.
The idea of a “Lonesome Crowded West” is intentionally oxymoronic, and more real than ever. The breakdown of community leaves us isolated even as the bloated bellies of our cities progressively swell.
Whether it be the result of neoliberalism, socioeconomic instability, climate change or TikTok, the loneliness epidemic is rewriting the mechanics of our social culture and leaving young people fractured and disconnected.
I see the themes of “The Lonesome Crowded West” reflected in my own lonesome crowded East. We’re all overworked and overtired, watching the landscape be rendered unrecognizable in real time. We ache for lost familiarity and hunger for the new and exciting.
Things are different and things are the same in the best and worst ways. So it goes.
It’s a song about love that has become mechanical and meaningless. The music itself in the first half of the song feels like an anxious limbo, either waiting for a decision to be made, or to muster the strength to make it yourself. The production reminds me a bit of James Blake, and the vocals of Moses Sumney.
Part of the first verse goes,
Held you in my arms / Still I couldn't keep you close to me Living in a world Where sex is suicide (suicidal) Making love to feel inside, we watch each other die Living by a limit, reaching past our means
As the song goes on, it reaches a point where it slows down, as if to stop and think; momentarily, there are no words. The space for revelation feels too still, so racing arpeggiated fears bleed their way back in. It’s beautiful and briefly grandiose, woven with melodic wails from the anonymous singer. And then it all dies down again.
“Radiosex” is good company for moments of solitude. It’s five minutes and 35 seconds that seem like one big question, or that aforementioned limbo. Like swimming in space.
The rest of “Emotional Heat 4A Cold Generation” also has some very lovely tracks worth checking out, some of which I’ve played in sets before (“Micromoog“). JIL does a good job of combining the electronic foundations of their songs with organic, soulful, psychedelic elements. I’ll let you know what I find in further exploration of their discography.
He’s only got a few projects out, most of which are singles, but there is one that is very special: his 2015 EP, called “Cult Hymns.”
I originally found “Cult Hymns” in 2021, if memory serves, and it was sticky limerence at first listen. I remember I first became enamored with the concept of digital dystopia then (you know when you spend so much time being afraid of something, how it starts to become comforting?) as I was just about drowning in literature about class struggles and rotting social structures, transhumanist visual culture and desolate electronic ambience.
So, “Cult Hymns” was a perfect addition to that arsenal.
There are seven tracks, two of which feature R&B artist Daniel Caesar. The first track, “Brothers,” starts the EP off in unsettled whispers and a sustained synth that sounds a bit like a siren. They trickle off into flickers that, to me, seem to resemble city lights reflected in a polluted body of water.
In that VICE interview I mentioned, JIIN talks about being inspired by “The Sword of Doom,” a samurai movie from 1966 and “Akira,” the 1988 Japanese cyberpunk film, among other things. “Every time I watch something, I automatically soundtrack it in my mind, and vice versa. It can be a voice note or a weird thing I watched years ago. Probably why I can never sleep,” he says.
The next track on the EP is “Cult Logic,” a song that sounds like it would be played when the world ends; a thoughtful “Congratulations, it was all for nothing!” The song is disturbingly upbeat for its premise and speaks of feeling trapped in something, presumably a messy love whose time is up:
Eyes in paradise falls One more rock for the mockingbird call The sun rises up for me Isn't what you showed to me Let the water wash away your sin
The third song on the EP, “F***ed Up,” features Daniel Caesar. On it, Caesar lazily sings about being alone once more, getting caught up in women, work, and drugs to fill the void of a lost lover. JIIN’s production makes the intro to this one promising, but I’m honestly not the biggest fan of Caesar’s vocals against the music.
The fourth track, “Bury Me in Money,” is a fuzzy pool of chants and bass that throbs like a headache. After it is “Pole Dancer,” which bears samples of a koto and a synth so distorted it sounds like a scream. Both tracks are instrumental, contributing something a little trashy to this late-stage capitalist nightmare of a soundscape JIIN has created.
The last two tracks on “Cult Hymns” are my personal favorites: “God,” featuring Daniel Caesar and “Fell Thru,” another instrumental.
“God” is so eerie and suffocating at times; Caesar sings about succumbing to isolation as “Cult Hymns” comes to a climax. It sounds like a breaking point as he begs for affection. Bestrewed throughout the song is classic symptoms of madness: sounds of furious scribbles and pages being torn from a book. Makes you feel like you’re right there with him.
Then lastly, but definitely not least, is “Fell Thru.”
This song is a wasteland. It’s barren and beautiful, and I save it for the quietest hours of the night. I find something about it so tender, in the midst of its empty space and crumbling architecture. It’s unclear what’s being sung, but it sounds both like a “thank you” and a “goodbye.” It’s been a soundtrack to many a late night over the years, and I’m so glad to have unearthed it again.
Perhaps knowing so little about JIIN and his intentions for his work is what makes “Cult Hymns” such a treat. It allows you to make sense of the bleakness for yourself, deciding what each of the songs could be about, if at all; it’s equally nice to sit with it for what it is, too, letting the abyss do the talking.
