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Modest Mouse's "The Whale Song"

For my first music pick on this blog, I'm going with a safe pick--a band that is one of those oh-so-rare combinations of being critic darlings and of having a fair amount of mainstream success and, most importantly, whom I personally like.  So in order to complete the act of eating my cake after already having it, I've selected a decidedly post-rock song from their catalog.  It's the perfect crime--or at least would be if it weren't for this introductory paragraph confessing to ir.

Anyway, we can consider this music pick an ode to post-rock--Metallica's "Fade to Black"* minus all the aspects that make that song a regurgitated, somewhat boring, not-all-that-emotionally-effective piece of music.

The most glorious gift that post-rock has offered us is freeing us from those god-awful shackles pop/rock has tried to get us to surrender into for the last 60-some years of the gerne's existence--its structure.  Because if this song is "Fade to Black" re-imagined (note: this song isn't "Fade to Black" re-imagined), then it's "Fade to Black" distilled to its best parts--skipping the first 4 minutes of the obligitory Verse-Chorus-Verse-Chorus* droning that almost makes it feel like Metallica's telling you that you have to sit and be a good boy for a while before you can be rewarded with a cookie (ie, a semblence of good music).  

"The Whale Song" starts with a driving bass riff; within a few bars we get some splatters from a few different instruments; within a few more bars we get one of those lovely balances the Classic Rockers found between riff and melody (like a string of licks that have enough structure for it to almost be a melody, but really it's just a string of licks with shape); within a few more bars we're at the wailing guitar solo.  The solo morphs and evolves and expands with Jeremiah Green's drumming keeping the noisescape glued to the tenuous shape of the composition.  Then the lyrics are come, then the guitar solo continues 'til the song finds its ending.  Now that's how you structure a god-d*mned song.

And though the guitar style isn't really an exclusively post-rock element, it is a welcomed step toward modernity, sounding more like a theremin solo than the heralded technical work of the Classic Rockers.  There certianly was some great guitar work between the 60s and 70s, but a couple decades after the discovery of the 24th fret on the high E string and of tapping, "Fade to Black" sounds more like a regurgitation of what "should" be good than it sounds like any original work of art.

Finally, there's the lyricism.  "Fade to Black" is a victim of the rock mentality: their equipment got stolen, so they were sad; when you're sad, you write a ballad; in a ballad, you talk about how you're sad and maybe you'll even kill yourself.  As a result, you get the 24-line, 7-minute epic journey starting at "Life it seems will fade away" and grandiosely ventures all the way to "Death greets me warm / Now I will say goodbye."  Are you catching my sardonic tone?

"The Whale Song," again a distillation, achieves all the weightiness and anxiety it's going for just by repeating, layering and accentuating the line "I guess I am a scout, I shoulda found my way out."  Whether the song is about being an artist and lyricist who wishes he could get out of his gloominess so he could lead others out of it, or if being an indie rocker with some mainstream success makes him feel the weight of the entire rock genre on his shoulders just wishing he could go down with the ship of rock, or if it's some sort of Moby Dick thing (the only interpretation that accounts for the title), or if it's all or none of these interpretations--regardless, the song works.  Because that's the funny thing about poetry that seems so counter-intuitive to so many lyricists: crushing the entirety of anxiety for yourself and the people who rely on you into the diamond of one line* can be a lot more meaningful than going on for 24 lines about how losing your equipment makes you sad.

So I do really like this song, but making it my first pick is kind of an underhanded way of getting to write about the awesomeness of post-rock.  I feel kind of bad spending so much time making "Fade to Black" into a whipping boy, but it was just the best way to highlight the efficiency of this song.

*Note: I often make strange, inter-genre song comparisons.  This is a relatively mild act of it; just wait until next week.

*The chorus is just a distorted riff repeated somewhere between 2 and 2,000 times.  It's as though James and the gang got together and decided that the thing that makes the Verse-Chorus thing so annoying is the refrain of lyrics and the catchiness of the hook, not the transparency and unbearble predictability of its structure and the maddening repetitiveness it lends to not just as a song to itself but as part of a catalog that exclusively uses that same exact technique.  Good call, boys.

*Borges