Onstage, Modest Mouse Is Anything But

At the very front of College Street Music Hall, the fog machine had begun to work its magic, filling the air with a fine white dust. Photographers, pushed up close to the stage, gritted their teeth. Audience members slightly farther back murmured with glee. A group of bros prepared to rock out to Modest Mouse front and center. 

Lights shifted once, twice, falling to a near black before they faded completely. The crowd cheered in anticipation, 2,000 mouths opening wide. Then, laser-like lights cut through the dust. Modest Mouse’s lead singer Isaac Brock stepped to the front, placed a multicolored slate of nails to his guitar, and began to play. A handful of welcome, anticipated thumbtacks flew straight from his throat across the cavernous hall.

Wednesday night, this was how Modest Mouse mesmerized, playing songs from their newest release Strangers to Ourselves, as well as several older favorites. To every cluster of loud, reverb-drenched notes that left the stage, the crowd screamed-sang faithfully back, a flock reunited with its indie-rock shepherds.

Modest Mouse plays a lot of gigs. A lot. The band is what happens to seasoned when it goes on steroids and grows wildly. But it was not the music — more aggressive than the group’s studio recordings let on, and all played at an ear-splitting volume — that kept listeners entranced. Instead, it was the performance itself, a drawn-out shock to the system from which it was impossible to tear one’s eyes and ears away.

Don’t get me wrong. The music is good. It’s great, actually. While the band will arguably never make an album better than The Moon & Antarctica (or the group’s beloved Good News For People Who Love Bad News), Strangers to Ourselves holds tight to the quirk and nuance that has distinguished the band: It is chock-full of smart, mind-bending lyrics and unexpected, jaunty rhythms that fuse seamlessly into rock.

The thing that distinguishes their live performance — and made the $45 price tag worth it for 2,000 listeners packed shoulder-to-shoulder, all swaying violently — is the extraordinary character of the group. Holy moly. In the face of Brock’s nonstop, full-throttled, sweat-soaked performance, guitar guru Jim Fairchild was calm and collected, grooving to the music as if he was living through it for the first time. Lisa Molinaro kicked ass quietly, a slow-smoldering presence right up until she came to the front of the stage, bathed in blue and yellow light, and was shredding front and center on the violin. Tom Peloso rocked out on the keyboard while Russell Higbee and Jeremiah Green held it down on drums a few steps back.

Not that it was a surprise. After all, as Brock said many times ​“I don’t feel like talking. I‘m here to play.”