Track Review ⊙ Daily Ops Home
Modest Mouse :: "Fire It Up (Live)"Live At The Hollywood Avalon (2006)
So the Mouseketeers postponed the good news to early ‘07, because, well, they’re assholes, but I’m fine with that, and besides, it’s not like an album with Isaac Brock and Johnny Marr is going to suck anyway. And if it does, if come next year, We Were Dead Before The Ship Even Sank doesn’t drop like a Kekule wet dream of self-reflexive guitar figurines, then haters can call me an asshole. Officially.
The new songs on the recent Avalon bootleg hint why the Mouse is confident enough to book out the frickin’ Royal Albert Hall next May, assimilating the boundless jam of Lonesome Crowded West into the melodic synergy that has seen the group rocket onto the airwaves. Out of the hampered sound and mic booms, what I guess we’ll call “Fire It Up” emerges complete, Marr’s pulsing guitar wriggling its way nimbly around Brock’s spurious pick scars, just in the same way as James Iha’s smooth solos played the perfect foil to Billy Corgan’s angular riffing. Corgan should take note -- “Fire it Up” melts emotion and callousness into the same overflowing, hellish furnace, setting sluices for tension release, swimming upstream towards the Watergate, before resolving itself in one of those spine-tingling dive solos. It isn’t self-immolating, self-parodying or self-justifying. It’s a fucking awesome song from a band back in full swing, steamrolling further off the beaten path and dragging the sales up with them.
Alan Baban :: 20 November 2006 |
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