A younger, less mature version of myself hated the idea that somebody could sell out. I viewed art as the most sacred and personal thing in the world. Turning it into profit would be completely blasphemous, right? 

It wasn’t until a couple weeks ago, when I went to see Modest Mouse play at Brooklyn Steel for their 20th anniversary show of Good News for People Who Love Bad News, that my opinion changed. This album marks the beginning of the band’s rise into mainstream fame, which also means that it marks the beginning of the end of the modest Modest Mouse we knew and loved. Issac Brock became the ultimate sellout. 

But my takeaway from the show was not about how terrible they were. In fact, I was kind of proud of Brock. He took a thing he loved to do, namely make music, and found a way to live off of it as a career. The bad thing about selling out is sacrificing your talent and creativity just to make money and to be popular. But wouldn’t it be worse for Issac Brock to not be able to afford to pay his rent, and eat food? Or to have to work an office job doing something that he doesn’t love? There’s something very romantic and cool about being “the starving artist,” but in reality we all need to get paid for doing something. Thursday’s guitarist Norman Brannon once wrote about how as he grew up, he found the prospect of playing shows where he didn’t get paid well less and less appealing. All the other hardcore kids didn’t want to care about not making money for gigs. But in reality, if that’s all you got, you still gotta eat. 

The crowd at Brooklyn Steel was, no joke, the most Williamsburg crowd of all time. Super-yuppies in yerba mate T-shirts and mustaches. They loved “Float On” even if it sounded like Katy Perry. They loved it when the band played “Dance Hall” because even the people who didn’t know the song could pretend to sing along. This was my fourth time seeing Modest Mouse, and the four shows have all been drastically different experiences. The first time was when they played the best OG Modest Mouse album, The Lonesome Crowded West, and the crowd reflected it: Those fans really knew and valued the best of this band’s sound. These fans were more like generic indie-pop normies. 

Being accepting of selling out only goes so far, though. Whereas it applies to Modest Mouse in the (modest) indie-fame game, it doesn’t really apply to bands who go past that into the realm of mass-market myth (the Sex Pistols being #1 on the list of bands that went too far, and Green Day being #2). There’s a point of no return where you are just doing it for the money. Artists like Gwen Stefani fall into the category of musicians who realized they were talented in a way that was profitable but who stayed true to their sound, which feels different from those who compromised their talent for money. As somebody who’s been super against pop music ever since I was little, I’ve been trying to enjoy things for what they are, instead of because of who likes them. As far as indie-pop goes, I really like Good News for People Who Love Bad News. Through my own songwriting ventures, I’ve learned that you can’t control the songs you write, and if something gets popular, that doesn’t mean it has less merit or that it’s less cool to like it. As Lou Reed said, “No kinds of love are better than others.” But still, I’d rather everything was great, always.

The Cure, Songs of a Lost World

Everything about the new Cure album was supposed to be bad. The crazy amount of advertising seemed to foreshadow as much, and the last album they put out was terrible. Every single particle in my body told me that it was gonna suck and that I shouldn’t even try to review it because then I’d just have to give it a negative review, which would make it much more likely that I wouldn’t have anything interesting to say. Old popular favorites of mine like the Smashing Pumpkins or Pixies have been trying to revive themselves from the dead A LOT lately. Today’s music climate, often being crap, makes it easy for them to do this, because most people don’t really care if music’s good or bad anymore. If it’s bad, it’s kind of an “oh well, better luck next time” sort of thing, since they already have all the fame and credit that they could ever need. Nobody is going to look at the new Pixies and say that the Pixies are a bad band because their recent album is bad. At worst, a new album is an excuse to sell more records and tour, which is the only way that bands make any real money these days.  

Against my better judgement, which I have to say has gotten pretty good by now, I am obliged to declare in public that Songs of a Lost World is a great record. So great that I now have it on both vinyl and CD formats. I even have the live album saved and preordered. Now, is this partly because I never thought they could do it? Yes, definitely. But I also think it’s a genuinely good album. It echoes back to the days of Disintegration and The Head on the Door. The songs are long and cool and expansive and airy, and thus very Cure-like — without being an actual direct copy of their older stuff.  

Something that has happened to me in this space, the more I write about music and do this column, is that I start to feel myself slipping into an older, more judgmental version of myself. Dare I say, Elitist? Sometimes I’ll judge a book by its cover, and not write about it simply because I think I have a spidey-sense for this kind of thing. I had become an arrogant know-it-all, until Songs of a Lost World blew me out of the water. I’m very proud to declare that Robert Smith has still got it. I love his music. What more can I say?

The Meat Puppets, Out My Way

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how drugs affect creative people. On the one hand, a lot of great musicians reach for drugs as a way to put themselves in a different headspace. A lot of great bands have benefitted from this impulse and produced some of their best work while stoned. One of those bands is the Meat Puppets, whose best albums came from the height of their drugged-out mania. 1984’s Meat Puppets II and 1985’s Up on the Sun are two of the best albums that came out of the American Indie Underground. They are undeniably druggie. 

The less romantic side of drug use is what happens after. There’s a point, it seems, once you’re past the original creativity-boosting high, where drugs make you stupid and less able to function — until you stop functioning at all. This is what happened to the Kirkwood brothers, Lou Reed, and countless others who kept chasing the high all the way down into the depths of bad music. What’s even worse is seeing artists who are capable of greatness lose the ability to tell the difference between crap and gold. How much credit drugs should get for creative highs is certainly debatable; but there is a particular type of musical awfulness that only comes from drugs.

Out My Way is a literal representation of that awfulness. It’s boring, stale, and unremarkable. It kind of sounds like a bad Meat Puppets cover band or something. I wish I hadn’t heard it.

The Hard Quartet, The Hard Quartet

The Hard Quartet (which is, by the way, a great name) is a “supergroup” combo of musicians, most notable of them being Stephen Malkumus. Some bands and artists have a tendency to try to make the same music they made in their heyday, which Malkmus and company, thankfully, didn’t do with their self-titled debut. The record feels like a bunch of aging musicians just sitting around in a circle and jamming it out. Then maybe one of them had the bright idea to record a session and start a band. 

Whereas Sleater-Kinney is the ultimate by-moms-for-moms band, the Hard Quartet is the ultimate by-dads-for-dads band. Not to say that dad music is bad by any means; their album is actually pretty good. It just has a more relaxed feel, like nothing is depending upon it — it can just be a fun project between friends. It’s very comparable to late Wilco in that way. The standouts on the album are “Killed By Death,” “Hey,” and “Rio’s Song.” 

I think Stephen Malkmus has definitely proved by now that he will never not be cool. He’s just one of those people who never loses track of themselves or their talent. I’m excited to see what comes next for him and his dad-band.

Kim Gordon, The Collective: Regrettably, I didn’t write about the Kim Gordon album when it came out in March. My excuse is that I didn’t even know of its existence. But the time has come, and I now have to review it even if it’s a little late. Let’s just say that Pitchfork’s rating of 8.4 is complete proof of that outlet being garbage. 

The Collective was maybe the worst record of the entire year. And that’s not an exaggeration. In Kim Gordon’s attempt to “go pop” — or really, go insane — she put together an electronic rap-ish album that sounds like an audible version of her decline. She used her iconic voice to read out shopping lists and talk about TikTok. 

Sometimes musicians have the intention of making something that sounds fresh and new, like a statement piece, like something nobody has ever heard before. Which is definitely noble, except when it sounds terrible. People shouldn’t make new kinds of music for the sake of being different, they should make it because it’s good. 

I have the same feeling about punk. I hate the Ramones because they didn’t “define a genre” or were a “protest”; their songs were simply catchy because their music was dumb and bad. Some things can be dumb and bad without being artsy. Pitchfork said her album “sounds how TikTok brain feels.” I don’t know what “TikTok brain” is, but it is surely a far cry from the cool “My Friend Goo” Kim Gordon of the past.

Kim Deal, Nobody Loves You More: I had lower expectations for Kim Deal’s solo album than I did for the release from her fellow Kim. Which is not to say that Kim Deal is a worse musician. In fact, she’s probably a much better songwriter than Kim Gordon. But I did feel like Kim Deal was the more likely of the two to succumb to marketing and a flashy, disconnected production, perhaps because her persona was always less self-assured. 

Nobody Loves You More is such a weird album. The pacing of it feels off somehow, almost as if Kim didn’t write the songs herself. The album cover looks AI-generated, with a picture of Kim Deal standing beside a flamingo before an ethereal background. Most of the songs are orchestral compositions on top of a drum machine. The second song on the album, “Coast,” directly copies the melody from the Blondie song “Sunday Girl,” just slowed down. I can imagine having that idea too, but it wouldn’t qualify as an original song. 

Kim’s latest album also happens to be one of the last ever worked on by Steve Albini, who also produced Surfer Rosa by the Pixies as well as Pod by the Breeders. So it’s clear that Kim Deal and Steve Albini had some kind of ongoing musical connection. Part of me wants to blame the resulting mess on him, as none of his albums in his later career really did well or were all that good. And though I’m not trying to make excuses for her, this was also Kim’s first album release as a solo artist. Part of me feels like both Kim albums were just marketing things to keep them both relevant for the summer tour season. I’m not sure how much either of them believed in these songs.

In conclusion: Kim D beats out Kim G by a small margin. Both artists used to be cool, and though they are now being controlled by corporate marketing machines animated by the empty goal of popularity, I hope that they will one day come back and regain what I understand to be their natural state of coolness, which can be frustratingly ephemeral.

Weirdo jazzy indie-rock band Thirsty Curses releases two new singles, “Foot in the Door” and “Bombs Away,” in preparation for their upcoming album . . . Nausea, one of my favorite crust bands, puts out new remasters of their 1990 album Extinction. . . everyone’s favorite band that they don’t know any songs by, The Brian Jonestown Massacre, puts out a Mazzy Star-ish single called Don’t Look At Me with Aimee Nash . . . a band that’s gotten their fair share of coverage here at County Highway, Destructo Disk, puts out an EP that’s even better than their last one. . . Adrianne Lenker, the popular folk artist (folk is popular??!!)  releases Feel Better, an awesome new single  . . .  Cool emo band Thursday puts out “White Bikes,” their first piece of new music since 2011, and they’ve still got it!. . . Georgia goth band Tears for the Dying puts out a new single called Dagger Deep Within My Mind’s Eye, rounding out 2024 as a triumphantly great year for goth . . .  Conservative Military Image, a new hardcore band, puts together a great new EP, Stab Shovel Chew / Hard To Love / Every Stripe Earned, that’s not hard to love.