Time is now part of Modest Mouse’s process. During the band’s early peak, they raced out three monumental albums in five years—long, sprawling records, seemingly confined only by the capacity of a CD—along with troves of great EPs, rarities, and odds and ends. But after “Float On” elevated them to alternative rock’s A-list, the spigot slowed. It took the band eight years to complete 2015’s Strangers to Ourselves, and although Isaac Brock promised another album “as soon as legally possible,” it took them another six years to finish The Golden Casket.
Even more than Strangers to Ourselves, The Golden Casket never tries to pretend it was recorded in a single time or place—a band that once worked in frantic bursts of inspiration now prefers lengthy, unhurried tinkering. But unlike Strangers, which was the first Modest Mouse album without new things to say or new ways of saying them, Casket has some unique sounds to show for all its slow-cooked experimentation. It’s some of the band’s most luxuriously textured work, a procession of pinging, clanging, reverberating tactile pleasures. Early on, Brock pledged not to play any guitar on the record, and while he ended up playing some, the instrument’s frequent absence clears space that’s inventively filled by percussion and troves of obscure and vintage instruments.
The album credits meticulously catalog each musician’s contributions down to their finger snaps, because this is the kind of record that differentiates between the sounds of different fingers. On one song, band member Tom Peloso is credited with playing “Fun Machine, piano, mini Korg, and Crumar”; on another, Brock plays not only banjo and melodica but also vibraslap, spacephone, and “soft drink percussion” (it involves soda cans). Even if you can’t place the vibraslap, the textural specificity helps these studio concoctions conjure any number of settings real or imagined: an Archie McPhee warehouse, a 1980s FAO Schwarz, the dumpster behind the Price Is Right soundstage, Danny Elfman’s rec room.
As usual, Brock’s songs are a strange blend of forced optimism and unforced paranoia. On the chipper side, there are a couple of easy-drinking radio singles, including the marimba- and drum machine-driven “The Sun Hasn’t Left.” “Lace Your Shoes,” an uncharacteristically earnest love letter to Brock’s children, is the most sentimental song he’s ever written. But he always sounds more believable on the gloomy stuff, and The Golden Casket gets dark. Between mostly tame swipes at selfies and online dating and pleas to put down the phone every now and then (“Just being here now is enough for me,” he repeats as a kind of transcendental mantra on “Wooden Soldiers”), he centers the album on the anti-tech manifesto “Transmitting Receiving,” the bleakest, most upsetting music he’s recorded since The Moon & Antarctica.