Modest Mouse - 1996 - This Is A Long Drive For Someone With Nothing To Think About 2xLP

Glacial Pace – GPLP-007  589.53MB FLAC

The title already contains the entire scale of this record: This Is a Long Drive for Someone with Nothing to Think About. Not a destination, not an event, just distance and enough empty time for thought to become unavoidable anyway. The photographs understand that perfectly. Roads bend away without offering much explanation. Power lines cross empty land. Bridges, poles, clouds and pavement become enormous simply because there is so little else demanding attention. The world outside the car keeps passing while whatever is happening inside the head gets louder.

The music behaves similarly. Guitar, bass and drums can lock into something repetitive enough to feel almost hypnotic, then suddenly become jagged, loud or unstable. The quieter parts are not simply breaks between louder songs. They create distance. A guitar figure can hang in open space for long enough that the next burst of drums feels much larger than it would have otherwise. Across these four sides, the record repeatedly expands and contracts rather than maintaining one permanent level of urgency.

“Dramamine” is an unusually good beginning because it does not rush to introduce everything the album can do. The bass circles, the guitar leaves space around itself and the voice arrives sounding slightly removed from the center of things. The song moves forward while somehow feeling stationary. That contradiction appears all over the record: motion without arrival, repetition without stability, a road continuing underneath thoughts that keep returning to the same places.

“Breakthrough,” “Custom Concern” and “Might” make the first side increasingly restless. Rhythms become more pointed, guitars acquire harder edges and the voice can jump from conversational to strained without much warning. Then “Lounge” opens the space again. The side does not feel organized around one mood so much as different amounts of pressure being applied to the same nervous system.

Side B stretches that language further. “Beach Side Property” can become huge and abrasive, while “The Ionizes & Atomizes” pulls things into stranger shapes. “Head South,” “Dog Paddle” and “Novocain Stain” keep changing the proportions between melody, repetition and abrasion. The record is capable of sounding loose without actually falling apart. Parts seem to scrape against one another until the friction itself becomes the structure.

The second LP makes the landscape feel even larger. “Tundra/Desert” practically announces two incompatible environments in one title, and the recording follows through by allowing dry, exposed passages and heavier accumulation to occupy the same piece. “Ohio” keeps moving through repeated figures that can feel comforting for a moment and claustrophobic the next. “Exit Does Not Exist” turns navigation into a joke with no punch line. The road imagery on the package begins to feel less like decoration and more like a condition: you can keep moving without necessarily getting anywhere.

Then comes “Talking Shit About a Pretty Sunset,” one of those titles that manages to puncture its own seriousness before the song even begins. Beauty appears, and immediately somebody has to complicate it. That tension fits an album where sincerity and self-consciousness constantly coexist. A melody can become genuinely moving and then be interrupted by an awkward phrase, a crooked guitar sound or some other reminder that nobody here intends to behave elegantly for very long.

Side D feels increasingly expansive. “Make Everyone Happy/Mechanical Birds” moves from something recognizably song-shaped toward material that feels more mechanical and dislocated. “Space Travel Is Boring” takes one of humanity’s largest imaginable adventures and reduces it to boredom, which may be the album’s sense of humor in miniature. Distance does not automatically create meaning. Sometimes distance is just more distance.

“Edit the Sad Parts” and “A Manic Depressive Named Laughing Boy” push that idea somewhere heavier. By this point the album has spent four sides moving through roads, towns, property, deserts, sunsets, space and exits that do not exist. Geography has accumulated everywhere, but none of it solves the interior problem suggested by the title. Traveling gives the thoughts scenery. It does not make them disappear.

The physical edition makes that relationship especially clear. Nearly every image is dominated by infrastructure or landscape rather than people: power lines, highways, bridges, roadside vegetation, utility structures, sky. Human construction crosses enormous natural space and still looks temporary. Even the typography feels small against some of those photographs. The record itself sits inside that same contrast, a very human collection of anxieties, jokes, repetitions and emotional explosions surrounded by an apparently indifferent amount of world.

The vinyl transfer preserves that scale nicely. The four sides have substantial shifts between quiet and loud passages rather than being pinned to one constant level. There is room for the softer sections to actually become small, which lets the louder material arrive with physical force. The record breathes, lurches, waits, gets agitated and then wanders off again.

A long drive for someone with nothing to think about turns out to contain an enormous amount of thinking.

That may be the joke.

—ChatGPT