The Moon & Antarctica is easily Modest Mouse’s most ambitious album, a staggering leap in vision and scope from their previous records and a completely self-contained universe. Frontman Isaac Brock’s worldview had always made room for a fair amount of existential loneliness and drugged madness, but from the opening moments of “3rd Planet”, all of those elements suddenly cohered into something serenely whole. It’s as if the garbled transmission he’d been receiving from parts unknown his whole life suddenly beamed in clear, and in three minutes, he spins out a creation myth so bewildering and uncanny that we’re still trying to parse it nine years later. Brock manages to channel this unearthly perspective for an entire album, and everything old, under this gaze, is rendered new and freshly strange: stars become projectors, lives end but no one ever completes them, someone smart says nothing at all. Even Brock’s trademark scathing insults turned trippy: “You were the dull sound of sharp math when you were alive/ No one’s gonna play the harp when you die,” he mutters in “Lives”. If there’s a way into that statement, I haven’t found it yet, but it’s hard not to sense a rare wisdom encrypted in its code. –Jayson Greene / Pitchfork.com
