Modest Mouse singer-guitarist Isaac Brock's favorite subjects are distance and travel, and the suspension of time that goes along with them. In his songs, the world is an endlessly cycling existential horror show — two different songs on this mini LP include the lyric "I don't know but I been told/You never die and you never grow old." Partially recorded at the same time as last year's The Moon and Antarctica (and including a remake of that record's schizophrenic "I Came as a Rat"), Everywhere and His Nasty Parlour Tricks is Modest Mouse's sparsest and strangest release, a parched, alien beauty illuminated by a web of little guitar solos that flicker like heat lightning. These one- 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."

“Time to Pretend”

Listening to MGMT’s breakthrough song, one might interpret it as being about the excesses of rock stardom, but it’s actually about the duo’s pet praying mantis. Ben Goldwasser and Andrew VanWyngarden told Rolling Stone they got the idea from the insect's jerky movements. The mantis died, but the two bandmates kept the egg sack and allowed the hundreds of eggs to hatch. “We tried to name them all, but they died after a day,” said Goldwasser, with VanWyngarden chiming in, “But the praying mantis dance inspired us.”