• Record Label: Sony
  • Release Date: Apr 6, 2004
Metascore
83

Universal acclaim - based on 32 Critic Reviews

Critic score distribution:
  1. Positive: 28 out of 32
  2. Negative: 0 out of 32
  1. Even though this album isn't as immediately or showily brilliant as The Moon & Antarctica, Good News for People Who Love Bad News reveals itself as just as strong a statement.
  2. Probably the biggest complaint could be that the group has tightened up their sound even more on this release, leaving behind even more of the roughshod qualities that made their earlier discs blister with such energy.
  3. Alternative Press
    80
    If Good News... isn't the pillar-like masterpiece Modest Mouse fans have waited years for, it's proof that things haven't completely fallen apart. [May 2004, p.92]
  4. No bad news here, just more headline-making from an innovative, ever-maturing group of musicians.
  5. Billboard
    90
    A daring yet accessible disc.
  6. The Mouse is back, just as polished and schizo as it ever was.
  7. At these transcending moments, "Good News...". is elevated into excellence. But overall, there is too much Mouse that bores and not enough Mouse that roars.
  8. This is a more varied album than The Moon and Antarctica (which did seem to have only one speed), and with the return of original member Dan Gallucci, Brock appears to have revived the heavy lead guitar playing of their early work.
  9. If there's a touchstone band for this album, it's Little Creatures-era Talking Heads cranking out songs that are joyously eccentric, celebratory and catchy.
  10. Entertainment Weekly
    83
    [A] Tom Waits-ian reinvention. [9 Apr 2004, p.84]
  11. Filter
    92
    It's passionate. It's thoughtful. It's catchy. It's their breakout moment, their best record, and... it will be one of the best albums of 2004.[#9, p.100]
  12. This is a great band's most fully realized and mature album in a career already dotted with highpoints.
  13. 90
    Never happily slotting into any template demanded back in their home town, MM are nearer to some wondrous mish-mash of Pavement and Beck; closer in harmony to The Flaming Lips.
  14. Mojo
    80
    Moments of simple, exultant joy are plentiful. [Jun 2004, p.102]
  15. While the album is not as cohesive a vision, many of its songs are more focused.
  16. New Musical Express (NME)
    90
    A real-life pop record. Well, not pop in the Girls Aloud sense of the word obviously, more in the drop-dead, fuzz-box brilliant 'Here Comes Your Man' sense. [10 Jul 2004, p.48]
  17. For all its transcendent moments, Good News ultimately fails to hold together all that well as an album.
  18. It just feels that amidst his bare and heartfelt explorations of life and the old wooden box wherein we all end up, Brock has learned to dance, learned to allow himself a smile.
  19. Q Magazine
    80
    45 bonkers minutes. [Jun 2004, p.103]
  20. On the group's fourth proper album, a mightier Mouse refine their weirdness and become a pop band while grasping at dark truths that pop ordinarily denies.
  21. Good News could well be looked back on as the band's rite of passage, filled with energetic but reckless noisemakers and more studied, stylistically adventurous tracks.
  22. Spin
    100
    Half expansive, burnished radio-rock, half swampy Delta hoodoo-hollerin' that reeks of Brock's Southern sojourn. [May 2004, p.103]
  23. The A.V. Club
    80
    The songs still rely on Brock's echoing guitar patterns and Mobius-strip lyrics, delivered in the voice of a harried, hip-hop-inflected square-dance caller, but though the vehicle stays the same, the scenery outside the window changes considerably.
  24. A useful addition to a genre that prizes brain over brawn.
  25. Ultimately, what makes Good News so successful is that it retains the melancholy mood of past works, while at the same time adding depth and maturity.
  26. Weathered now, their herky-jerk stands up smartly to interjections from the Dirty Dozen Brass Band.
User Score
8.7

Universal acclaim- based on 213 Ratings

User score distribution:
  1. Negative: 11 out of 213
  1. methe
    Dec 22, 2006
    3
    Goodbye old modest mouse.
  2. Dec 11, 2020
    10
    It is such a great album that I've been listening to it frequently ever since I stumbled upon it, a whole year ago.
  3. Feb 11, 2019
    10
    Loved this album. Anything these guys make will always be better than half of everything else I've heard. Dance Hall is a good song, too.