Pitchfork

John Barth wrote a short story called "Night-Sea Journey", a grand existential allegory that encapsulates the sum-total of life experience in the journey of a group of swimmers toward a far shore that may or may not exist. One of the concepts Barth distills in the story is that of different orders of time. The narrating swimmer muses upon the existence of a Maker who created their universe almost accidentally. The narrator reasons that with each flick of their tails, he and his fellow swimmers churn the water behind them into chaos with hardly a thought-- similarly, there might be some supreme swimmer, the Maker, who exists in a higher order of time, wherein each stroke of his tail lasts the equivalent of an eternity to us, and in whose wake entire universes are born and die without the Maker's notice.

Modest Mouse frontman Isaac Brock's literary tastes may lean more toward Bukowski than cerebral, post-modern metafiction, but his long-standing fascination with microcosms that become macrocosms (or vice-versa) when approached from different observational positions is pure Barth. After enlarging the saline tunnels of our bloodstreams to teeming biospheres on The Moon and Antarctica's "3rd Planet", the parallax is back: Where so much indie music solipsistically places the Self at the center of a revolving cosmos, Brock again bends perspectives on "The World at Large"-- the proper opening song of Modest Mouse's Good News for People Who Love Bad News-- within the vast universe, a grain of sand that, if anything, hampers the gigantic gears in which it grinds, but more likely has no effect at all.

"The World at Large" is a collage of guitar, whistles, timpani, piano, Rhodes and mellotron that spreads over the listening surface like ice crystals coalescing in a time-lapsed film. The song reflects the more wistful side of Modest Mouse (think "Heart Cooks Brain"), and though nothing's overt, one gets the impression that the track was spurred by a trauma that he has the good sense not to sing about directly. Instead, he engages once again with what Saul Bellow called "the mystery of being." "Ice age, heat wave, can't complain. If the world's at large why should I remain?" Brock asks, immediately pulling the lens out wide and shrinking himself to a tiny figurant on a blasted, void landscape. It's a neat trick, for when shrinking the self, pain shrinks as well; by enlarging the universe, the trials and travails of one's life become inconsequential, almost laughable. "In the grand scheme of things," as they say. The moth who beats himself against the light must think it's a pretty important endeavor, at the time.

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