An Eraser And A Maze hosts Modest Mouse’s growing pains

Isaac Brock’s rhythmic yawp emphasizes sheer size, trailer-dotted geographical expanse of the American west and metaphysical digressions on the universe. It is all life and death, skies and oceans, universal math equations and star projections.

Like any indie institution once worth their salt, however, the past haunts today’s Modest Mouse. After five years of churning out ragged classics, a competent transition to the majors – resulting in The Moon & Antarctica’s respectable polish and Good News For People Who Love Bad News’s pop navigations – initiated a ripple effect. Their three-piece lineup was fleshed out; skeletal lo-fi was no more. Lapses between albums grew, resulting in records marred by over-tinkering wherein instrumental credits ran a gamut of kalimbas, Wurlitzers, and soda cans. A once-panoramic view grew muddled, unfocused.

Where to next? An Eraser and a Maze echoes familiar obsessions, including the pained, cosmic tremolo of “I Can’t Talk Right Now” or Brock’s pen on the rolling “Remember Yourself Not Me”: “Sometime I’ll be dead and gone, sooner than I hope but I hope I’m wrong” is a line recognizable for any fan. “Life’s A Dream” employs dry guitars harkening back to their debut’s lonely chugging, Brock’s venerable bark commanding as ever (outside of the record’s subdued moments).

Aging defines Modest Mouse’s past two decades of sonic soul-searching, lyrically entrenched even before then. Unsurprisingly, after declaring “We’ve been eating our own young” on its opener, maturation is of the essence. No youthful burnout or fading away as a legacy act, their middle age is defined by a forceful curiosity in the studio (for better or worse on these post-2004 efforts). Here, familiarly awkward slip-ups mingle with poignant moments. Grating synth bass on “Rotten Fruit” feels part-and-parcel with the evocative closing track “Impossible Sundays”, another canonical entry on the process of becoming. “Well everything is impossible if you don't even try to try / Although no one stays the same the whole time,” Brock sighs over a snaking bass groove that conjures former member Eric Judy.

Real absence likewise permeates An Eraser and a Maze. The death of longtime drummer Jeremiah Green in 2022 is honored with “Stoner Party”, named after a phrase he spotted on the wall of an abandoned home; late friend and scene member Sam Jayne is sampled on “Life’s a Dream”. It seems that loss grips the tracklist’s thematics.

Instead of fleeing, however, the band accepts – without resigning to the fact – that they are just as defined by then as they are by their present and future. “I can’t believe how long I’ve wanted to be / living in the past,” reflects Brock on “Look How Far". The original wisdom of a line from 25 years prior – ”I'm the same as I was when I was six years old / And, oh my God, I feel so damn old” – is rearticulated once more: “Look how far we haven’t come!” The disjuncture defines this flawed third-act treatise on distances overcome and untraveled, on embittered optimism and world-weary admissions.