***1/2 Modest Mouse

BUILDING NOTHING OUT OF SOMETHING

(Up)

"Pavement are dead; long live Modest Mouse!" Like so many one-to-one critical reductions, this scene watcher's pronouncement is at once accurate, premature, and dangerous, everything but irrelevant (only addled anarchists would be so blind). What's more, it's exactly the kind of contradiction-riven comparison that might be appreciated by resident boy genius Isaac Brock. On Modest Mouse's 1997 The Lonesome Crowded West (Up) -- the disc that catapulted this Washington State trio to the heights of avant-indie fame (say, a foot and a half above sea level) -- Brock's high, emotive sing-speak, his tinny, angular pyrotechnic guitar, and his smart, abstract aphoristic lyrics combined at right angles in a 74-minute art-punk tour that was perfectly Pavement-like in its beauty, bite, and breadth, in the way it recalled fistfuls of geek rock titans simultaneously, from Talking Heads to Built To Spill. But if Pavement's Steven Malkmus finds refuge in his upper-middle-class birthright to irony and distance, Brock's abstract intellectualism and unmediated passion were honed while he was a high-school dropout living in a shed behind his parents' trailer home. So whereas Pavement's Westing (By Musket and Sextant) turned inward for escape, this compilation of "every seven-inch and rare track they have done since 1996" reaches out, opening with three heart-wrenching stunners that scale a summit. The rest of the album then unfolds at leisure. "I'm going nowhere/But I'm guaranteed to be late" is only one of their positive/negative gems, so finely cut and set, you won't care that it's a perfect lie.

-- Franklin Soults