Musical Degeneration
We recently recorded (or as Natalie says, "taped") an episode of Austin City Limits on Tivo that featured the bands Modest Mouse and Guided by Voices. I watched the first 10 minutes of the Modest Mouse performance and was reminded of how much I loved the band back in 2002 and 2003. I imported four of their albums into my iTunes library a long time ago. This is the beauty of iTunes, and digital music jukeboxes in general: music you haven't listened to in years is as easy to locate and listen to as music you've been listening to repeatedly for the last couple days. Not so with CDs: you keep a couple CDs in your car trunk, at your desk, on top of the stereo at home, etc. At no point is all of the music located in a single place. In this case, I just looked up my old Modest Mouse albums, transferred them to my iPod in less than a minute, and was listening to some nostalgic tunes during my morning commute to work.
Modest Mouse produced some really amazing albums in their early days ("Moon and Antarctica", "Lonesome Crowded West"), but have been diluted in recent years ("Good News for People Who Love Bad News"). I stopped listening to them in 2004 when Natalie started giving me a hard time about the popularity of "Good News..." with the O.C. crowd. I have since arrived at the conclusion that the O.C. crowd can have the "Good News..." album, and I'll take the rest. What is it that makes the quality of a band's work degenerate so? I read a review of their "Lonesome Crowded West" album that said "...Modest Mouse made better music when they were all drunk and on acid." Maybe so. Here's to booze and acid...
My favorite Modest Mouse albums are:
The Moon & Antarctica
Lonesome Crowded West