The Mouse that Roared

Music | September 16th, 2015

photo by MeiLi Smith

From the manic buzzing of unseen bees that signaled the band’s arrival on the stage of the Bluestem amphitheater down to the last sonic drop of their second encore set, Washington indie rockers Modest Mouse blazed through a nearly two and a half hour set with a seemingly unceasing energy.

Founder and frontman Isaac Brock was the rightful center of attention as the octet bombarded their way through their catalogue, mining gems from their most recent record, “Strangers to Ourselves,” as well as tearing through fan favorites like “Float On” and “The World at Large.” Restless from the moment of the first chords’ ringing, he channeled his boundless exuberance into an entertaining frenzy of springing guitar squeals and dives, going so far as to sing into the pickup of his guitar, purging a fascinatingly robotic tone from it. In between songs, Brock delivered absurd, off-the-cuff banter, wryly riffing on playing for an audience deserving of chairs to sit in, and later performed a charmingly idiotic, impromptu ode to root beer.

The audience, when not laughing off Brock’s idiosyncrasies, was enrapt in the band’s uniquely danceable punk rock, showing their earnest approval by chanting along, bobbing heads, and pumping fists. Modest Mouse had the crowd in the palm of its hand, especially during the hyped-up rendition of “Lampshades on Fire,” which was met with a surge of hip-shaking and at least one stoked crowd surfer.

Brock was most certainly up for entertaining the band’s most hardcore fans, offering up a powerhouse of an encore, dashing through no less than five clear audience favorites before the band suspiciously exited the stage as the house lights remained dim. While more than two-thirds of the concert-goers left for the gates, a growing choir of “one more song” chants may very well have paid off, as the group returned to the stage for a tiring second encore, to the great satisfaction of the remaining fraction of the audience.

It was around this point that the concert went a little further off track than this reviewer expected, with not one, but two notably stocky men separately rushing the stage for brief and awkward victory dances before being reunited with the ground face-first and whisked away by security. Shortly after these bizarre breaches, Brock challenged audience members to a sort of “Name That Tune” game - to which the answer was, as nobody guessed, “Black Candy” by Beat Happening - and led his obviously annoyed band members through a series of false starts of their penultimate encore song, interrupted by a broken history lesson about the group’s early recording days. Before getting into strumming his banjo for the last tune, Brock took a couple hits from his vaporizer, and, after finishing the tune, stonedly advocated for the crowd to move to the west coast and to “legalize this shit,” his parting words before he disappeared off-stage for good.

Despite the sour taste left by their questionable second encore set, Modest Mouse put on a fabulously entertaining show, filling the still south Moorhead nighttime with a loud and raucous set that surely pleased casual and diehard fans alike.

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