Modest Mouse: The Lonesome Crowded West

Ass-Headed Bottom: Who says Bottom is always right whenever Slothrop (always) is wrong? That's a canard, assholes. Turns out Slothrop is correct, and I must admit a momentary lapse of reason, at the steady pace of once per millennium. Between 1001 CE and 2000, he was correct one evening, late in 1997, as he drove me home from the unpleasant record store Vintage Vinyl. He had caused me to blow some cigarette money on a cd by a band I'd never heard of, and regretting the expenditure, I put this album on in Slothrop's hideous car. I expressed immediate displeasure at the sounds emitted, even when he touchingly fast-forwarded to the track "Cowboy Dan." I longed for my Everclear, my friends, to my shame I preferred my Everclear. Slothrop, I was wrong, I admit. Though you still owe me $20 because it is evident that you are not going to buy every Frank Zappa record ever made, you zani!

   Anyway, when I think back to 1997, what was I like? Well, pissed off! Who wouldn't be? It was 1997, and I was eighteen, and I listened to a lot of pissed-off music back then. And almost all of it was garbage. I punched a lot of lockers that year, and most of them I punched for no good reason. Now, having adored this album pretty much since the moment I exited Slothrop's goldenrod car, I have a better measure of where I was at. Nirvana? Fun, but I probably didn't need to shoplift the Hormoaning EP. Jane's Addiction? Rockin', but Porno for Pyros not so much, and Perry Farrell, deservedly, ended up strumming Purim songs at private events in LA. Everclear? Bottom hangs his head in shame, and swears off thistle for a week of recompense.

   And Modest Mouse? The Lonesome Crowded West? As I drink away the part of the day I can't sleep away, I recognize that every last chord on this album vindicates the locker dents I made that poor high school janitor repair. I've quit smoking, like a docile donkey, and I might lease a hybrid, and everything I do now is for girls!, but when I turn this album on I still feel like I'm eighteen and there's nothing in the whole world except lockers to punch forever.

   Slothrop, you have 992 years to figure out how to be right again. And you can't be until you remove your hand from Jason Giambi's balls.

Slothrop: Ass-Head's humility before Slothrop's wisdom is appropriate. 

Soon the chain reaction started in the parking lot

Waiting to bleed on the big streets
That bleed out on the highways and
Off to others cities built to store and
sell these (plastic) rocks
Well aren't you feeling real dirty
Sitting in the parking lot