We Were Dead Before The Ship Even Sank
- Modest Mouse
- Band Name: Modest Mouse
- Record Label: Sony
- Release Date: Mar 20, 2007
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This 14-track-strong album is very much good news for people who loved Good News for People Who Love Bad News.
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Easier than ever to grasp, yet still constantly, joyously vexing, We Were Dead is another terrific set from a band that couldn't make something dull even if drowning were the only other option.
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Not just an album that revisits the dancey guitar-pop that made "Float On" an unlikely #1 hit, but sharpens and emboldens it for their most accessible album to date. [#16, p.93]
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90Is there another "Float On"? It scarcely matters: 10 years into their career, Modest Mouse have stumbled into their best album yet. [Mar 2007, p.137]
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Music dignitaries and primordial fans will be contented. If they're smart, they'll rejoice.
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It's a sincere album that is as friendly and rewarding as any of their previous works.
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We Were Dead sounds like Modest Mouse, only better.
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80A winner. [May 2007, p.106]
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80[The album] adds a newfound sang-froid to their quiet/loud approach. [May 2007, p.100]
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80A fantastic voyage. [May 2007, p.128]
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80While Brock's pop instincts have never been more refined, his jitteriness has never run more rampant. [Apr 2007, p.85]
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Much of We Were Dead feels like a culmination of the sound that Modest Mouse have spent the last decade or so honing. [May 2007, p.145]
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80The Modest Mouse frontman has the kind of overbearing personality that seems to bring out the best in Marr: their collaboration on the band's fifth album is thrilling.
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80This is a band working at the very top of their game, and this album is a beautiful, brilliant beast.
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80There's more melody than usual to be found here. [24 Mar 2007]
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It's a successful experiment... largely because the differences between Marr and Mouse turn out to be more harmonious than anyone could have expected.
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78Another solid (if not necessarily great) record.
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Clearly, what we're dealing with here isn't a new Modest Mouse, but one with a few new, calculated tricks.
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At 62 minutes, this album feels self-indulgent, and some of the 14 songs leave little impression.
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73In the end, it's not as excellent as their early work, but still pretty entertaining.
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Both Marr and MM mainman Isaac Brock have a weakness for bombast that can make them sound like Snow Patrol playing Gogol Bordello, but the album heaves with vim and variety.
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70The problem is, there's simply too much record here.
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In fairness, We Were Dead... excites almost as much as it frustrates; the problem lying not so much in its commercial aspirations per se as an occasional inability to integrate them into a satisfying whole. That, and there's too much shouting. And it's way too long.
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70This could be Modest Mouse's finest hour were it not a little long - the nuances are occasionally rather swamped by the effort of listening to the hour-long record through.
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Like everything the band has released since signing with Epic in the teeth of a millennial panic, it's louder and somewhat less twisty than the group's indie output.
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We Were Dead Before The Ship Even Sank is a really good, if not necessarily phenomenal, rock record.
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70The album as a whole does drag on, and the songs aren't as immediately grabby as those on their last disc, but We Were Dead is more interesting and varied than Good News.
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70We Were Dead... is denser than its predecessor with tunes that seem willfully harder to penetrate.
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The results are enthralling, even when they seem to be thrashing at coherence. [19 Mar 2007]
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70If "We Were Dead . . ." is a little much to take in all at once, the sheer mass of the tunes becomes easier to manage over repeated listens.
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68A disproportionate amount of the album's tracks sound like a commercialized knockoff of previous songs, past highlights revisited after a process of radio ready distillation.
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It's exhausting.
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65There are some excellent moments.
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Too often it seems as if Modest Mouse plays it safe on We Were Dead Before the Ship Even Sank.
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Imagine the cheerful fatalism of "Float On" without the hooks, which is bizarre: Hooks would seem to be Marr's specialty.
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60While it is, at times, a challenging listen, there are enough catchy moments to prompt enough listens for the thing to grow on you.
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It's inoffensive, painfully so, with the smell of something run through focus groups from the get go, written and produced by committee to sell the greatest number of copies.
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Brock's idiosyncratic worldview, so much a part of what made Modest Mouse special to begin with, has left the building.
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User score distribution:
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Positive: 133 out of 148
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Mixed: 7 out of 148
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Negative: 8 out of 148
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