Modest Mouse

Sell out? Hardly. If anything, Modest Mouse only got weirder after they delivered their major-label debut, The Moon & Antarctica. Take their breakthrough track, “Gravity Rides Everything.” While it features lonesome cowboy chords and bleak lyrics about dead bodies and bad motels, it was licensed by Nissan for a minivan commercial. That’s because the song hits you in the chest immediately, making you feel something — we’re not exactly sure what, but something — as swiftly as the hopeful, sun-baked hooks of “Float On” and the sweeping micro-symphonies of “Dashboard.” Lest you think Modest Mouse’s career happened overnight, our Next Steps zeroes in on the band’s critically acclaimed college-rock years.

In the early ’90s, Modest Mouse lived up to their name, sharpening their power-trio sound in a trailer park. A little more than a decade later, the band was basically a collective, rounded out by two kit-clobbering drummers and former Smiths guitarist Johnny Marr. Our Next Steps fills in the blanks between then and now, from the tormented roots-rock twang of “All Nite Diner” and the spare, wide-open spaces of “Lounge (Closing Time)” to the controlled chaos and carnival barker spasms of “Black Cadillacs” and “March Into the Sea.” As if that wasn’t enough material to make you wonder what the Modest Mouse “sound” really is, our Deep Cuts includes a couple of live jams and the palette-cleansing side-project of frontman Isaac Brock.

While it started with the manic recordings of an obsessive fan, Ugly Casanova quickly became a must-have extension of Isaac Brock’s delightfully demented mind. Seriously, just try and call it a side-project after hearing the haunted harmonies and deftly picked acoustic guitars of “Barnacles” and “Cat Faces.” Those tracks fall right in line with the frontman’s best Modest Mouse work: the hypnotic, dovetailing riffs of “heart Cooks Brain” and “Dramamine,” the hooting and hollering of “Steam Engenius,” and loose/loony live versions of “Paper Thin Walls” and “Interstate 8.”

When “Float On” became Modest Mouse’s first #1 hit and one of the biggest modern rock songs of 2004, many new fans assumed they were some sort of fluke success story — a byproduct of the increasingly blurry line between indie and mainstream rock. If only things were that simple. Modest Mouse’s first single actually dropped a decade earlier, and as the band’s self-produced demo (see: the slow, solemn build of “Broke”) proves, their songwriting was rock-solid even back then. With that in mind, our Modest Mouse Essentials makes sense of every last EP, from the brassy outbursts of “King Rat” to the cruise-controlled chords of “Night On the Sun.” Not to mention fan favorites like the frenzied funk of “Fly Trapped In a Jar,” the manic melodies of “Ocean Breathes Salty,” and the slick new-wave nods of “The View.”