CREDIT: MODEST MOUSE
After eight years since the release of the band's last album, Modest Mouse released Strangers to Ourselves in mid-March

It’s been long anticipated, but it’s finally here. The band Modest Mouse has been working on its sixth studio album for the past eight years – longer than most bands even exist.

The band’s prolific record Strangers to Ourselves finally dropped March 17, and it’s anything but modest.

If you’ve never heard of these indie-rock veterans, Arcade Fire is about as close as it gets, and even then, the comparison is quite a stretch. Unique doesn’t even begin to cover this group of innovators.

Strangers to Ourselves is spread over 15 tracks and clocks in at just under an hour. For an album almost a decade in the making, you might have expected something a little more extensive. But what we have here is a textbook definition of taking quality over quantity. From its mellow introduction in “Strangers to Ourselves” to it’s behemoth ending in “Of Course We Know,” this album takes us on one hell of a ride.

While this album is still very much a product of Modest Mouse, carrying its signature guitar bends and bah bah bahs, the composition as a whole is clean cut. While much of the older catalog captures a sense of raw emotion and minor chaos, this new collection of songs must have gone through more than 50 drafts since 2007. If this contrast is lost on you, listen to “Lounge (Closing Time)” and follow it up with the newly released “Shit in Your Cut.”

On the upside, the amount of production and time spent on these tunes has created tight-knit tracks in which every note and effect comes together to create epic orchestrations. If you haven’t listened to Modest Mouse before, this album is a great place to start.

Strangers to Ourselves carries two highpoints in the songs “Lampshades on Fire” and “The Ground Walks, With Time in a Box.” The songs themselves are almost self-contained greatest hits albums, harnessing Brock’s cryptic lyrics and unique delivery, laced with syncopation and somewhat chaotic song structures. In almost a satirical manner, “Lampshades on Fire” opens up with the infamous bah bah bahs, but hey, they’re still catchy even after six albums.

Strangers to Ourselves comes with a defining low point, however, in the song “Pistol (A. Cunanan, Miami, FL. 1996).” This song seems to be a failed attempt to rehash “Tiny Cities Made of Ashes,” and everything from the lyrical complexity to the instrumental production is a complete catastrophe. This facetious post-apocalyptic techno jam about the murder of Versace is a dark scar on an otherwise terrific album. If failed experimental escapades are your thing, then you’re in for a wild ride, otherwise let’s just pretend this song doesn’t exist.

As far as successful innovation goes, the songs “Ansel” and “Sugar Boats” take the cake. “Sugar Boats” sounds like the theme song of a carnival from hell, the kind we have nightmares about. It opens with an eerie toy piano, dubbed over quickly by tubas, which give way to a brass section. This is uncharted territory for Modest Mouse, but they utilize every new instrument beautifully. Just picture a fun house designed by Marilyn Manson, and you’ve got a pretty accurate representation of “Sugar Boats.”

As a whole, Strangers to Ourselves sounds like an album carefully articulated to please as many fans as possible. Modest Mouse didn’t make this album for themselves, they made it for the fans with commercialism in mind. The only people to be let down by this album are the original fans who blared Lonesome Crowded West and in their cars nearly 20 years ago. Let’s all hope that the next Modest Mouse album can capture some of the youthful bashfulness that was lost in Strangers to Ourselves.

Rating: 5 out of 5