Modest Mouse - Everywhere And His Nasty Parlour Tricks • CDs • Vinyl Records • LPs • Music Albums

and two-chord grooves (plus a blurry instrumental megamix, "The Air") are blessed with a rhythm section that can tap gently at a single note until it's driven in far enough. Aside from a burst of death disco at the end of "You're the Good Things," the band stays cool and spaced-out, but its dry throb is the wind beneath Brock's gnarled wings. Songs drift through the panoramic calm of Everywhere until they run aground, after a minute and a half or five times that long, while Brock drizzles out vinegary guitar lines and reels off nightmare images and poker-faced jokes in his strained lisp - his idea of a compliment is "You're the extra ton of cash on my sinking life raft."

DOUGLAS WOLK
(RS 883/884 - December 6, 2001)