Tom Waits once said his favorite portion of the symphony was the seconds before the tap of the conductors stick, when the instruments of all stripes are in their own worlds without care to the sounds they or their siblings are making. This big mess of noise was what he loved most.
I can’t say I share that passion but I do share its sentiment. Years ago in some music appreciation class I’d be better off forgetting about, we discussed the possibility that there was music made not to be heard. Made to be made, or made for the self. If it could be made, then why would it? And what purpose would that music serve on the whole. I had no idea, and the clever answers given about some eastern religion and a flute never really impressed me.
The answer I would find years later is that music should be played by itself because (and this is going to blow your mind here) because you think it sounds good there. Generally this worms its way into acceptance. That spasm of music Waits enjoys has been implemented and used in his music for years – maybe not exactly the same but influenced enough- and many the novice ear would agree it’s a big snapshot of noise in every song he’s made. Music is best to me when it’s a slathering of crap that only sounds correct because I’ve heard this song before. And few bands do it quite like Modest Mouse.
Before I get into examples of why I like their approach I’d like to discuss what I don’t like. The art crowd loves to take this idea in concept and apply it mathematically to places it sounds good if you want to pretend you’re interesting; Fischerspooner, Mindless Self-Indulgence, Whirlwind Heat.
For every idiot with a dream of making their lack of effort into a million dollars, these three horrid examples serve as the vision of the dream realized. The difference here is intent. If the good examples sounds like the city streets; a bustling and busy kaleidoscope of noise, then these second-rate hacks sound like the screeching wheels of the subway cars beneath those Metro streets. If you suppose intent is too hard to determine, lets put it this way. There’s sloppy which implies a cultural dissonance, and then there’s the noises that make babies cry and adults crouch into battle stance. These are the differences I’m addressing here. Its really a battle of which sounds better, Godzilla or your High School Marching Band at the start of the school year.
Why Modest mouse does this best, and why any band does this well, is because these sounds have roles, they play characters and they very much add the right plot devices that are necessary to the performance that is the song you’re hearing. The crashing of broken accordions in pirate songs, the piercing lone howl of distant wolves that are eerily squeezed from bended guitar strings, the drunken frat-rat trumpets of renegade whales out on the hunt.
And the latter much more so, because the b-side scrap book released earlier this year has the outtakes in which those lone trumpets are met by an Issac Brock only prepared for the dry-run laughing on track saying “I love this ****.”
Don’t we all?
Men of Music and Messes tend to have a grander vision for their music of their impulses they are putting to music, and this is personified as it comes on the heels of a musical landscape that was immediate and thoughtless. Where red-faced screams are not the placeholders of real emotion, they are considered the real emotion. But like the empty calories of hamburgers at drive-thru’s these nuggets of music could neither sustain itself or the needs of its listening base.
Like conspiracy theories screamed in the streets of old Rome by snake-oil salesmen and mad priests, those looking for a more challenging challenge have looked to the masquerade of human engagement that is, for all intents and purposes, going on in the indie theaters and nowhere else.
While Brock continues to employee actors rather than musicians, the mess and its understanding are starting to recede, even if the assumption is that the music is becoming messier. But perhaps this won’t end as I assume, my expectations of Shakespearian scripts will devolve into the primal act of children jumping into a pile of autumn leaves. But if the end should be nothing more than the eruption of dead vegetation, crackling underfoot while children cackle then we should settle our minds upon the truth that intent however misdirected is best when it is honest.