Modest Mouse: "Parting Of The Sensory"

There are a lot of terrible things to say about We Were Dead Before the Ship Even Sank. Here's one: "Spitting Venom" impels me to violently shit my pants -- for the first two jerky minutes; the remaining six leave me to sit in it (Have you heard those horns? Searing gastro-horror, every one). The song multiplies into the same stuttered block cubicles as "The City," but that song breathed desperation where "Venom" charts the landscape of a so-called long song, blowing it five minutes too early, a long, flogging way from a point. This is Isaac Brock and this is Johnny Marr and this is their courting, and at one time I knew Brock to be sharp about love, his band wise about death, and in this manner they became a family. The Mouse's seventh piece is a cruel step-photoalbum, flashy and generous halfway through the union, but revealed to be little more than an acceptable facsimile of your real dad after an unwelcome stay. And while We Were Dead Before the Ship Even Sank isn't even a terrible title so much as just a stupid joke, it's a stupid joke when you try to figure out what you get when you put Brock and an unrelenting muse crush into a blender. Crap frappe is what, high in calories. I seem angry. I am angry, and I get cheap when I'm mad, so I won't keep you: "Parting of the Sensory" is "Spitting Venom's" A-side premature counterpoint, mostly because it's long and chunky and drags "The Stars are Projectors" behind it criminally. That hurts, the other room vocals, volcanic strings, cyclical backcountry holistic science aping what was once a truly special moment on a Modest Mouse album, that is, when all the contradictory, polyglot specs found a simple way to grow and coalesce and the band sounded goring-ly huge. Not to be again, but still the best logy part of logy We Were Dead, a swollen tool which should exist primarily on the glut of "Parting's" indulgent jaunts of drum circle codas, and ludicrous yapping about carbon theft, and then that other part with the drums. And of course this bogus hero of five-or-so minutes is just about on par with Good News (2004), which isn't very impressive, but is a simple point of disappointing reference. Except for "Satin in a Coffin," which scared away my narcolepsy.