(Yes, it’s for January. Whatever, who cares.)

I’m lucky in that our Year of the Month series has afforded me the opportunity in the past year to write about my two favorite rock albums of the 2000s. (Admittedly, YHF is my clear number 1 and this vies with another for the next spot– we’ll see if we get a Year of the Month 2005 to write about it. But I digress.)

Modest Mouse frontman Isaac Brock has long been one of my favorite lyricists, with his gift for introspection invoking the philosophical and the universal, the great questions, in a way that’s always haunted me and stuck with me. Though follow-up Good News For People Who Love Bad News was the more popular album, off the strength of lead single “Float On”– and don’t get me wrong, Good News is very much deserving of its popularity and very strong in the aspects that make me a fan– The Moon and Antarctica is just about perfect as an exploration of existence, the nature of reality, and what it means to be human– and in particular, the isolation that comes not only with the latter, but especially so for the kind of person who can’t stop dwelling on these questions. While I love the rich and varied sound of the album, it’s the degree to which Brock’s lyrical obsessions are my obsessions; the degree to which he can alternate looking for spiritual transcendence with the visceral revulsion of the physical flesh; the degree to which, like me (and especially like me in my youth), he seems to be looking for a way out, a seeker with a nagging radar telling him that there’s something beyond this just out of his reach.

The title of the opening track– “3rd Planet”– gives us an idea of the scope of this album, but even then it’s almost only a half-idea, as the lyrics go well past Earth itself to a broader musing on the shape of the cosmos: “Well, the universe is shaped exactly like the Earth / If you go straight long enough, you end up where you were.” (Like I said, a seeker, looking for a way to go sideways.) Brock touches on concepts of heaven, although in this case he is, for one of the rare times on this album, not talking about his own:

The 3rd planet is sure that they’re being watched
By an eye in the sky that can’t be stopped
When you get to the promised land
You’re gonna shake that eye’s hand

(Hey, maybe that’s what that cover art is about.)

And even that song comes back down to more human ideas, like the birth of a child:

Well, a third had just been made
And we were swimming in the water
Didn’t know then; was it a son, was it a daughter
And it occurred to me that the animals are swimming
Around in the water in the oceans in our bodies

before tying together birth, death, the universe, and the human experience: “And that’s how the world began / And that’s how the world will end.”

“Gravity Rides Everything” uses the titular force of nature which holds us all together and earthbound, via a much gentler melody and production than the rest of the album, as a sort of zen parallel: “What’s that riding on your everything? / It isn’t anything at all,” and a question of “What’s that writing on your shelf / In the bathrooms and the bad motels?” (“Graffiti Writes Everything?” No, it’s probably the Bible.) It’s also got one of the album’s most confident expressions of faith in the grand design: “Everything will fall right into place.” (Less than four months later, Radiohead would drop “Everything in Its Right Place.”) You might also recognize it from early-2000s commercials for the Quest minivan, which led to some snarky alternate lyrics from my friends and I: “Oh / Gotta buy / Nissan cars / Right now.”

The self-loathing of the human condition comes up a lot, from the very opening lines of the album– “Everything that keeps us together is falling apart / I got this thing that I consider my only art / Of fucking people over”– but most prominently expressed on the third track, “Dark Center of the Universe.” (The universe is the Earth is the person.) “Well, it took a lot of work to be the ass I am / And now I’m really damn sure that anyone can / Equally, easily fuck you over.” That’s the most repeated refrain in the song, but the rest seems to be talking about a breakup in cosmic terms: “I’m not the dark center of the universe like you thought”; “I might disintegrate into thin air if you’d like” … “If you can’t see the thin air, why the hell should you care?” Of course, God comes back: “Well, God said something but didn’t mean it / Everyone’s life ends but no one completes it / Dry or wet ice, they both melt, and you’re equally cheated.”

It follows that the breakup of “Dark Center of the Universe” would lead into what seems to be the acceptance and first steps of moving on of fourth track “Perfect Disguise.” “Perfect Disguise” kicks off what I think of as the “Cities Suite” of the album, perhaps because it reflects a song in another album I wrote about recently. Not all of the next five songs reference cities, but the first three do, and the suite taken as a whole– especially following “Dark Center of the Universe”‘s self-loathing and distaste for the human condition– tell tales of cities, society, and civilization, being alienated both in society and out of it. “‘Cause you cocked your head to shoot me down / And I don’t give a damn about you or this town no more” to “We’re going down the road / Towards tiny cities made of ashes” to “I wanna live in the city / With no friends or family” to “So long to this cold, cold part of the world” to “Well, I don’t want you to be alone down there.” The cities are ash; society is lifeless; the transcendence Brock seeks is back out in the wilderness.

That sequence is followed by “The Stars Are Projectors”, which kicks in almost exactly at the midpoint of the album, an over eight-and-a-half minute track that starts with a noisy spoken-word intro before moving into the titular verses, with a more meditative view of the cosmos, mixing ancient folklore and parable– shades of both the stars as pinholes to heaven and Plato’s Allegory of the Cave– and Brock’s own thoughts about death and the universe.

Back to those other songs. I assume I’m one of the more experienced drug users here, but I don’t think you need to be into acid to understand what I mean when I say “Tiny Cities Made of Ashes” reminds me of watching a campfire with that same close intensity, the flames carving patterns into the logs, that remain when they are burned through to ash, patterns that might resemble how a city might look from a distance if it were carved into a mountainside. Both It leads well into the next stretch of songs, too– the “tiny cities made of ashes” themselves prefiguring “A Different City”, and “I just got a message / That said, yeah, hell has frozen over” similarly prefiguring “The Cold Part.”

(For reasons unclear to me, Spotify cuts the outro to this song. The YouTube version below includes it.)

Following the tales of “Perfect Disguise” and “Tiny Cities Made of Ashes” of leaving the old city for a new (but still spiritually dead) one, the three-song stretch of “A Different City,” “The Cold Part,” and “Alone Down There” all touch on alienation in very specific ways; indeed, they almost play like the same story told from three perspectives. “A Different City” opens with a Radiohead-esque statement of technology both alienating us and numbing us to our humanity:

I wanna live in the city
With no friends and family
I’m gonna look out the window
Of my color TV

I’m gonna remember to remember
To forget you forgot me
I’m gonna look out the window
Of my color TV

That’s followed with “The Cold Part,” whose lyrics mostly but not entirely consist of “So long to this cold, cold part of the world,” including a reference to the Antarctica of the album title. I like to think of this track as metaphorical, another side to “A Different City”: Both the tale of an alienated person missing human connection; whether the cold is the hum of technology or the literal antarctic weather, the cold inside of a life without love and connection is the same. Brock’s self-loathing makes his need for the spiritual more moving: With his certain self-loathing acceptance of the “cold, cold part of the world”, Brock comes across like he believes that maybe the alienation and the happy march to hell are what he deserves.

“Lives”, the thirteenth track, is one of my personal high points, another meditation on the human condition– “Everyone’s afraid of their own life / If you could be anything you want / I bet you’d be disappointed, am I right?” And verse two is one of the high points of the whole album and as anthemic a statement about how to live and die as you’ll find in rock and roll:

And it’s our lives
It’s hard to remember, it’s hard to remember
We’re alive for the first time
It’s hard to remember, we’re alive for the last time
It’s hard to remember, it’s hard to remember
To live before you die
It’s hard to remember, it’s hard to remember
That our lives are such a short time
It’s hard to remember, it’s hard to remember
When it takes such a long time
It’s hard to remember, it’s hard to remember

Following that track is “Life Like Weeds,” which hits the listener with both sides of the album, the spiritual and physical, death and life: What seems to be Brock’s biggest regret and source of self-loathing (“I could have told you all that I love you”) and thoughts on death, the universe, and the afterlife (“And on the day that you die / You’ll see the people you met … And in the faces you see / You’ll see just who you’ve been”). It also provides this essay with its title, which I think speaks to the theme of the album: Though we come from a common source, it’s increasingly difficult to maintain our spiritual connections and to find that place of fulfillment, amidst all the alienation of our modern world and the self-loathing it creates.

There are a few more lighter, less existential songs along the way in the second half, like the upbeat “Paper Thin Walls” or the somewhat subdued “Wild Packs of Family Dogs,” moving with a weirdly zen detachment from verse to verse, as family members lose jobs, leave, or are torn apart. More existential but also worth mentioning is “I Came As a Rat,” with lyrics that touch on reincarnation and our interactions with the divine (“It takes a long time, but God dies too / But not before he’ll stick it to you”).

Brock’s gift for wordplay is subtle on this album but noticeable: I love the weird juxtaposition of “Gonna shake that eye’s hand”; “Paper Thin Walls” has “Everyone’s a voyeur and they’re watching me watch them watch me right now / They’re shaking hands, they’re shaking in their shoes, oh Lord, don’t shake me down.”

The only song I haven’t mentioned is closer “What People Are Made Of”; like so many of the albums I’ve covered on this site, The Moon and Antarctica closes with a bit of an oddity, a gruff and aggressive track that ends abruptly, rather stark in comparison to the rest. For all Brock’s spiritual searching, here seeming to portray a narrator in life after death, he comes to a bleak conclusion about life: “And the one thing you taught me ’bout human beings was this / They ain’t made of nothing but water and shit / All right!” That final scream abruptly ends the album, dropping us out of Brock’s metaphysical adventure and back into our own world.

I’ve talked a lot about the lyrics without talking too much about the musical content, but it’s absolutely perfect for all the music involved. Whether the spacier backing of “3rd Planet” or the pulsing guitars on “Dark Center of the Universe” or the jauntiness of stretches in “Tiny Cities Made of Ashes” or “Life Like Weeds.” Or the way “Lives” switches from sparse backing track for harsh lyrics to earnest pop-rock song in the plea above and then goes back, “A Day in the Life”-style.

“Tiny Cities Made of Ashes” also contains a Brock trademark– shouting into his guitar pickups. (If you wonder why he sounds so different on “Does anybody know a way a body could get away?”, now you know.) And many of the songs effectively alternate instrumental passages with the verse-chorus-verse structure, even when the two sections sound rather different. The loud/quiet alternation popularized by Nirvana finds its way into the music here, even if the two bands don’t particularly sound alike otherwise. The sound matches the words in my mind, lots of outer space and starlight and the blue of the soul. (And once in a while, the crumbling entropy of reality around it.)

I can’t do this album justice in a column, honestly. I’ve been trying for a few weeks now; I’ve made several attempts, none of which quite capture what makes it special to me, and they’ve all been kind of mashed together. It moves me, it hits me in my personal obsessions– life and death and God and the soul and the nature of reality and our place in it– and the sense of self-loathing and disgust that all that soul we have is trapped in a bag of meat and blood and shit and piss and eating dirt and drinking ash and breathing smoke. Modest Mouse’s follow-up, Good News For People Who Love Bad News, might have looked even longer and harder at the other side, might have delved even deeper into death, but The Moon and Antarctica is the closest Isaac Brock and co. came to transcending it.