The band had hired Brian Deck of Chicago neon-junkyard experimentalists Califone and Red Red Meat to produce The Moon & Antarctica. Yet sonically and stylistically it was a major pivot.

This wasn’t the deflating crossover move fans once feared when indie bands signed to a major, a fate that would sadly befall Modest Mouse eventually. Gnarled folk digressions persisted, like “Wild Packs Of Family Dogs,” on which Brock’s pet takes up with a gang of no-longer-domesticated animals and eats his sister alive. There were still raw and explosive rock songs, especially the album’s seething finale “What People Are Made Of” - a jarring conclusion to a sometimes trance-inducing collection, and one of the all-time greatest exclamation-point closing tracks. Less than three years later, The Moon & Antarctica found him further emboldened but also mellowed out to an extent. All the while Brock raged against “the paving of the West,” encountered characters like the dangerously churlish Cowboy Dan, and coped with his existential despair by “trying to drink away the part of the day that I cannot sleep away.” The scope would have been audacious coming from a seasoned veteran, and Brock was only 22. This aesthetic had reached its pinnacle on The Lonesome Crowded West, a tour de force on which Modest Mouse came roaring out of the gate and proceeded to show just how many maneuvers they could pull off without losing their queasy, combustible sense of self. Bandmates Eric Judy (bass) and Jeremiah Green (drums) were groovier than most of their peers - they sometimes resembled a basement hardcore version of Talking Heads’ jittery rhythm section - yet they still made sense within the scraping clatter that defined Evergreen State exports from Unwound to Sleater-Kinney to the gods of grunge. At its gentlest, his voice evoked the quivering whimpers of Built To Spill’s Doug Martsch, but Brock’s bark was far more ferocious and unhinged. Like Cobain, Brock owed an obvious debt to the Pixies’ kamikaze pop-rock - drawling and meditative one moment, hurtling into howling catharsis the next. Modest Mouse were, in other words, firmly entrenched in a lineage of Washington state indie royalty. There was also a Sub Pop single somewhere along the way. Johnson later co-produced The Lonesome Crowded West, taking over for Seasick Steve, the local bluesman and Kurt Cobain associate who’d helmed This Is A Long Drive. Most of the rest came out on K Records, the label run by scene pillar Calvin Johnson of Beat Happening, who recorded Modest Mouse’s first EP at his Dub Narcotic Studios back in 1994. Up also released several of the Modest Mouse EPs and compilations scattered across the mid-to-late ’90s. The first two Modest Mouse full-lengths were released on Up Records, the Pacific Northwest mainstay that also helped to launch Built To Spill, Quasi, and 764-HERO. (Naturally, it’s about grieving a miscarriage, and hating yourself, and scoffing at the notion of God.) Groomed yet still feral, clear-eyed even at its most hallucinogenic, Moon was the bridge between Modest Mouse’s DIY past and superstar future. The opening track alone zoomed out from “the oceans in our bodies” to the outer reaches of the universe - which, as Brock will tell you, is shaped exactly like the Earth - all in the context of the band’s prettiest pop song to date. Holed up between paper-thin walls and looking out the window of his color TV, Brock drifted through snowy barren wastelands, toward tiny cities made of ashes, and all the way up to the stars projecting our lives back down to this planet. But instead of Cascadian highways and trailer parks, this voyage traversed time, space, and the metaphysical realm, all from the discomfort of home. Released 20 years ago this Saturday, Modest Mouse’s major-label debut maintained much of the style, spirit, and sprawl of the group’s indie output. The Moon & Antarctica was a different kind of trip. It cemented Modest Mouse as one of the most ambitious units in underground rock and Isaac Brock as the poet laureate of cantankerous, self-loathing “ redneck logging town” intellectuals. The second, the instantly legendary The Lonesome Crowded West, was a long-distance drunk drive across mountain ranges dotted with soul-sucking strip malls. The first was literally called This Is A Long Drive For Someone With Nothing To Think About, though highlights like “Dramamine” and “Talking Shit About A Pretty Sunset” offered sufficient fodder for contemplation. At about 74 minutes each, these albums were journeys.

Both of the Issaquah, Washington indie band’s first two proper LPs pushed the limits of the compact disc. Modest Mouse were epic before they signed to Epic.

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