The Lonesome Crowded West

Three people from Issaquah, Washington, in their early twenties, recorded this album in seventeen consecutive days at a small studio in Olympia, Washington in the spring of 1997. Isaac Brock, Eric Judy, and Jeremiah Green had been living in vans and squats across the Pacific Northwest, touring relentlessly, watching strip malls and chain restaurants absorb the towns they grew up around, and the rage at that transformation is all over this record. The Lonesome Crowded West is the sound of the American West being paved over, refracted through a band that was too broke and too restless to do anything about it except play as hard as they could.

The album runs nearly seventy-four minutes across fifteen songs, which is ambitious for an independent record from three people with no real budget, and not a moment of it sounds calculated. Brock's guitar playing is jagged and physical, his vocals pitched somewhere between a sneer and a confession, and the band grooves in a way that bigger, more polished acts could not replicate precisely because they had not been through the same places. "Cowboy Dan" runs eight minutes of mounting fury. "Teeth Like God's Shoeshine" opens the album like a door kicked off its hinges. "Trailer Trash" is one of the most compressed portraits of economic desperation in indie rock.

Modest Mouse did not achieve mainstream attention until "Float On" came out seven years later. By that time The Lonesome Crowded West had already quietly become one of the defining documents of Pacific Northwest indie rock, an album that sounds like driving through the American West at night with no particular destination and plenty to be angry about.