Wrapping a wordy, darkly whimsical title around a bunch of songs many will find catchy and none will find pretty, We Were Dead Before the Ship Even Sank takes after Modest Mouse's other four albums, even with guitarist Johnny Marr added to the equation. Like everything the band has released since signing with Epic in the teeth of a millennial panic, it's louder and somewhat less twisty than the group's indie output. But where song lengths diminished to four minutes on 2000's The Moon and Antarctica and three on their 2004 breakthrough, Good News for People Who Love Bad News, here they're up to four and a half. Cut to a shot of Isaac Brock just not giving a fuck.

Epic hopes there's another "Float On" here to goose sales. This is unlikely, not just because novelties always are but because "Float On" found Brock in an atypically live-and-let-live mood. Usually he's more fuck-me, let's-get-lost or oh-shit-not-again. Insofar as his latest lyrics make sense at all, they yoke images of failure and frustration to the loud and the catchy — thus rendering failure and frustration more fun, although after five albums this victory is getting too theoretical. One "Float On" candidate is the instantly hooky "We've Got Everything," with its "we know, we know" backup and, well, its "left you dying on the floor" finale; another is "Steam Engenius," which tosses in some woo-hoos on its way to "stasis is what you got." That's what Brock can tell his label, anyway. Fact is, he's a dour guy with a lot of talent and a good hustle who's been mining the same vein of meaning for more than a decade. That's a long time — maybe too long.

“Is It True”

As the British Invasion reached its peak in 1964, Brenda Lee went from Nashville to London to record one of her hardest-rocking hits, her perky vocal backed by a stuttering, squalling guitar. That guitar was played by session musician Jimmy Page, yet to skyrocket to fame with first the Yardbirds and then Led Zeppelin. "She said to me, 'I've come here to make a record with the British sound,'" remembered producer Mickie Most. "She felt she wouldn't get the same sound in Nashville because they're only just catching up on the British beat group sound of about six months ago."