• Blush Photo
• Isaac Brock

As mentioned some moments ago, Modest Mouse played a great and really nicely balanced set for their headlining, Bumbershoot-closing set in the Memorial Stadium. They didn't hit every song I wanted to hear, of course, but as an old fan, I was pleasantly surprised with how much mid- and early-period stuff they pulled out. And the band (playing as a septet if I counted correctly) sounded great as well, dialed in just right, perfectly loud and clear from dubby bass to cleanly cutting treble.

"The View" and its strobe-lit chorus got the bros really riled up and ready to mosh. The distorted, wildly oscillating guitar solo on "Education" felt really recycled from the latter part of "Tundra/Desert." "Dramamine" still sounds just totally incredible, and the band played it with plenty of judiciously applied feedback on the lead guitar, an extended jam out into a big, noisy crescendo that dropped cliff-like back into that main riff for a coda which say Isaac Brock barking out a little freestyle almost-rap—it was everything I always loved about Modest Mouse's old sets , a little sloppy and feral and combustible, translated without a hitch to the arena. "Dashboard," with its driving beat and trumpet flares, is a big crowd pleaser, eliciting a big wave of hand-clapping along. Brock ended almost every song by barking into the mic then hunching down while holding his guitar up at about face level—an odd (well, maybe not for Brock) flourish.

Seriously, "Satellite Skin is just a painfully mediocre song by MM standards, a slow, dull, utterly unremarkable ballad. Just saying. After that song, Brock delivered some pat banter, asking how everyone was and noting how nice it was to play with Franz Ferdinand, and then he noted, "I'm playing with what I believe to be broken ribs. It fucking sucks, but I did it to myself." They played "Baby Blue Sedan" with a really simple arrangement, and it sounded great, and god damn it was nice to hear such an odd old song. "King Rat" featured a banjo and an airplane flying low overhead above the Space Needle; it was also the song that made me realize how much Brock reminds me of both Calvin Johnson and Frank Black in different ways and at different moments. "Tiny Cities Made of Ashes" began with the guitar seemingly unfixed from the locked-in bass (upright bass, if you're counting) and drums, although it all got into place soon enough. They played an slightly extended intro marked by record scratching guitar strings, and Brock missed the first few words of the first line, picking up around "cities." As the band played the song out, through one extended bridge or breakdown with freestyle rap (god, I'm glad Brock still does these dumb, seemingly improv'd raps) then another, I realized that this song was their latter-day "Tundra/Desert," an easily extendable, anxiously dance-y but still viciously scathing rock jam.

I haven't seen Modest Mouse in maybe a couple years, and I haven't been following their set lists or anything, so this may be totally standard practice, but I was surprised (and stoked) to hear the band launch into the guitars-aflame thrash of "Shit Luck," with its one killer riff and its few lines: "This plane is definitely crashing/this ship is obviously sinking/this building's totally burning down/and my luck is slowly drying up." It's a weird digression on the epic, untouchable Lonesome Crowded West, but it's always made perfect sense in a live set. This evening, Brock kind of abbreviated the last line, omitting the "my, my, my" and just delivering the last line clipped and just a beat early. Next was the still stunning Moon and Antarctica opener "3rd Planet," its chorus—"Your heart...felt good/it was dripping with pitch and made of wood"—just so big and heartfelt and killer. The band played a little Eastern drone fake-out intro to an otherwise simple semi-acoustic treatment of "Wild Pack of Family Dogs."

The band had the briefest false start on "Parting of the Sensory" (is this where they played the little tease of "Life Like Weeds"?), allowing Brock to ask the audience if everyone was okay. Everyone was. And everyone was even better when the band launched into "Float On," a song so legitimately universal and upbeat that it could reasonably bear the Kidz Bop interpretation, its circular chorus just an irresistible sing-along (side note: does the car crash in "Float On"'s lyrics remind anyone else of the auto accident from "Karma's Payment Plan"?) In a perfect world, the band would've followed "Float On" with their early, heartaching breakthrough "Tralier Trash," but instead they understandably played new song "Whale Song," a long, jammy, electric guitar fried, totally crap closer. (Full disclosure: I've been pretty indifferent to the band's stuff since Good News, and I greatly prefer their older material; I just feel like everything since the success of "Float On" has been too safely within the band's established borders, too much a recapitulation of that song's success—hell, "Florida" probably should've just been a Shins song.)

Luckily, even though the house sound engineers brought up some canned music after the end of their proper set, the band returned for an encore, kids totally stoked an freaking out at this almost inevitable occurrence. The band played a slightly rushed and raw (in a good way) version of "Paper Thin Walls," Brock not laughing all the way to the bank so much as spitting there. When that song came out, when Brock had just left Seattle with a bad taste in his mouth, it seemed insanely scathing, and it still kind of does, when it's not busy being totally catchy and oddly upbeat. They closed for reals with "Bury Me With It," a great shout-along which, at least where I was standing, didn't drum up all that much shouting (too bad), the band ending the song with a mighty thrash outro.

I had high hopes for Modest Mouse's set going into Bumbershoot this year, and I had pretty much resigned myself to being at least a little disappointed (and, gasp, maybe even leaving to go see some of Metric), but while it wasn't everything I wanted to hear from the band—that set would be hours long—it was just a fine selection and a fucking fantastic set. I just wish the rain had started coming down in torrents—that would've been perfectly terrible.