From the first meandering arpeggio of its 1996 debut album, Modest Mouse conjured a sound that was unmistakably its own.  

 On The Lonesome, Crowded West, Modest Mouse channel Brock’s frustrations into gloriously odd, gloriously rambunctious rock & roll “Trailer Trash” is probably the group’s definitive song.  

 The ruminations on Building Nothing are sprawling and uncertain. 

 Isaac Brock drops cosmic burnout science while the band gestures occasionally toward prog-leaning atmospherics. The album nudged Modest Mouse into the vanguard of American indie rock, adding just enough sheen to prick up the ears of new fans without sacrificing the grit of the early music. 

 The snippets on Sucker are abbreviated and petulant; as if the most perverse act these devout pessimists could envision in the face of the void was to make even their trash consistent in quality.  

 Modest Mouse has a well-deserved reputation as a must-see live band but that doesn't come through on this concert compilation. 

 An improbable chart success that showed the band could polish its delivery without changing its outlook one bit.  

 Brock drafted Johnny Marr (The Smiths) for We Were Dead Before the Ship Even Sank, an album as weird as any other in the band’s catalog.  

 An easily likeable EP that’s nearly as varied as We Were Dead, with “Satellite Skin” a coulda-been hit and the horn-addled “Perpetual Motion Machine” imagining the band as New Orleans buskers.