Pitchfork

Every so often, a band emerges whose popularity seems to defy conventional wisdom. Modest Mouse have hit their stride at a time when they're as peculiar as ever, harnessing a sound complete with banjos, kitchen sink percussion, damaged keyboards, and Dirty Dozen Brass Bands. Their success can't be left entirely to smart marketing; as legions of longtime fans will attest, the band has an unusually strong knack for memorable hooks rooted in muscular backbeats, and on "Ocean Breathes Salty", it's all about the breakdown.

Its verses swimming through heavily reverbed guitar notes and swelling crash cymbals, "Ocean Breathes Salty" offers a surprisingly melancholy tone at a time when straight telling-off seems to be the preferred method of angst-release dominating playlists. But there's a bit of that here, too: Between its accessible verses and chorus, Isaac Brock's dejected vocal slips into one of his fanatic near-rap segments, cutting his subject with the bizarre diss, "You tell me what you want and I'll tell you what you get/ You get away from me." It's not the kind of song I'd have expected to chart-- and as of yet, there's no telling whether it will even remotely approach the breakthrough success of "Float On"-- but then, Sony's head of A&R probably knows more about these things than I do: I might've re-released "Heart Cooks Brain" instead.