“Cowboy Dan” is the exemplary Brock character, a “major player in the cowboy scene” who insists he “didn’t move to the city/ The city moved to me/ And I want out desperately.” Despite all the movement that the Interstate offers, an unsettling claustrophobia reigns. These are songs about traveling away from home but never arriving at any particular destination. Modest Mouse tracks are full of references to highways, parking lots, blown gaskets, and the unsavory people one is likely to meet on a Greyhound.

Their more dissonant moments can be traced to Lync, a local post-hardcore band in the vein of Unwound.Īll of these influences are filtered through Brock’s jaded stories of navigating the overbuilt, stagnant American landscape. Brock’s guitar heroics and lyrical cleverness are reminiscent of Up Records labelmates Built to Spill, from Boise, Idaho. Their heart-on-sleeve earnestness is a product of Olympia’s twee-pop movement, centered around Beat Happening and K Records. Their loud/quiet dynamics come from Nirvana and other Seattle grunge bands who had, at the band’s beginnings in 1994, recently made the city the subject of national fascination. Always a step outside of any particular scene, they still borrowed elements from different local sounds. Meanwhile, the Interstate and the sprawling suburbia that it gave rise to defines Brock’s early lyrics: it is a symbol of escape, but also a guarantee that anywhere you can escape to will be pretty much the same.ĭespite Modest Mouse’s ambivalence about their native surroundings, they are undoubtedly a Pacific Northwest band. In its early days, Brock insisted that Modest Mouse was an Issaquah band to distinguish it from the Seattle grunge and Olympia twee scenes, even as their sound borrowed heavily from both. All of singer-songwriter Isaac Brock’s musical and existential preoccupations are attributable to Issaquah’s location on the outskirts of Seattle, just a stone’s throw from Olympia, with Interstate 90 bisecting the town. To understand Modest Mouse, you have to understand Issaquah, Washington.

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