Ripping Through Flesh, Wailing

Modest Mouse’s Isaac Brock writes a lot of songs that are not particularly about anything — they are shambling sketches of muddled lives, in which the best thing that can happen is that nothing particularly bad happens. Think of the band’s two mega-singles, “Float On” and “Dashboard,” triumphant pop gems which celebrate nothing more than muddling through.The crux of both songs is a kind of broken celebration: Life is shit, but at least it’s life.

This is why the band’s most recent pop-culture blip, a music video directed by the late Heath Ledger, feels like an awkward addition to the Modest Mouse canon. Ledger was a budding director when he died, and he’d just completed the concept for the video for the single “King Rat,” a song recorded for their last full-length, We Were Dead Before the Ship Even Sank, but relegated to the B-side of “Dashboard” and now included on an EP collection of sundries which came out last month, No One’s First and You’re Next.

The “King Rat” video uses Brock’s unhinged celebration of failure (“you know/you know/you know/it all went wrong”) as the soundtrack to a film with an explicit, specific purpose — it’s an anti-whaling video. The video is visually gorgeous, rendered a kind of minimalist faux-animation, but its heavy-handed, obvious message (what if the whales were hunting the humans?) simply doesn’t work for “King Rat,” or for any Modest Mouse song, songs which are always purposeful in their purposelessness.

A strange irony of the “King Rat” video, whether or not you applaud the depiction of cartoon humans being skinned in service to a political point, is that the record it comes from actually includes a track called “Whale Song.” Why that song wasn’t a natural choice for a video about whales isn’t clear — maybe Ledger or the people who finished the video didn’t know about it — but it wouldn’t have been a better choice for a political message about whaling, because Modest Mouse is not a ideological band. Regardless of any political opinions the band members themselves might have, the music of Modest Mouse is a tribute to chaos, not causes.

“Whale Song” is full of the anarchist bendy-guitar lines that have always typified Brock’s songs, whether Brock or Dann Gallucci or Johnny Marr is playing them. (Marr joined the band for We Were Dead, though on the band’s current tour he is replaced by Jim Fairchild, formerly of Grandaddy.)The riffs are less pop hook than brain-worm, and a minute or so into “Whale Song,” the jumpy melody gives way to screeching and howling — a languorous moan that is, even, a little whale-songish.

When Brock’s vocals finally come in, he’s once again singing about unfulfilled possibility: “I know I was a scout/I should have found a way out,” he groans. The song would actually work on a literal, this-is-about-whales level: one can imagine a member of the pod (whales travel in these family groups for protection, no?) watching the others succumb to nets and spears before he himself is caught (“I’m rising up/wish I was sinking down”). But even this is too simple.

“Whale Song,” the real plight of real sea mammals notwithstanding, is not a message-song; it’s not about ecology or animal rights. It’s another document (like so many of Brock’s) of the human mess, of how we are trapped in and by ourselves and each other, how we do the things we don’t want to do and don’t do the things we want to do.

As a metaphor, whales are pretty heavy-handed. Ask Jonah or Ahab or even Pinocchio: They are always something big, something ominous and dark, something that will swallow us all, from which there rarely seems to be an escape. No redemption comes in “Whale Song,” no floating on, no melted radios playing summer jams: just those guitars, sound ripping the air like harpoons through flesh, wailing.

Modest Mouse and the Night Marchers at the Knitting Factory on Saturday, Sept. 5, at 7:30 pm. Tickets: $32. Visit sp.knittingfactory.com.