Album Review

Modest Mouse, ‘An Eraser and a Maze’ Review: Too Many Ideas, Not Enough Payoff

Words by The Pit Standard

Modest Mouse have never been a band that needed to make everything fit neatly. Their best records thrive on awkward turns, unruly guitars and Isaac Brock’s ability to make a seemingly throwaway observation sound like a small existential crisis. On An Eraser and a Maze, that unpredictability returns, but the distinction between a song taking an unexpected turn and a song that hasn’t quite come together becomes harder to ignore.

Rating: 2.5/5 stars

The band’s first album in five years arrives in the wake of founding drummer Jeremiah Green’s death in 2022. Brock has described a more instinctive approach to writing this time around, deliberately easing off the creative filter. There are flashes of the scrappy, abrasive energy that made Modest Mouse so compelling in the first place, but instinct alone doesn’t make 15 tracks worth keeping.

‘Picking Dragons’ Pockets’ gets things moving with a bright, almost carnivalesque arrangement. Mallet percussion and jagged guitars give the opener a restless energy, while Brock turns his attention towards technology, public perception and the strange business of trying to remain an individual in a world that increasingly treats everything as content. It is one of the album’s more convincing songs, with enough melody to anchor its stranger details.

‘Remember Yourself’ takes a more reflective approach, leaning into acoustic instrumentation and Brock’s thoughts on mortality. Its message is direct, perhaps too direct at times, but the song has a tenderness that prevents it from feeling entirely like a collection of familiar observations. That emotional thread becomes more affecting on ‘Third Side of the Moon’, where the music grows heavier around a performance that sounds genuinely bruised. The loss of Green hangs over the album, and here Brock finds a way to address it without turning the track into a straightforward memorial.

These moments suggest a record with a stronger sense of purpose than its execution consistently delivers. ‘Life’s a Dream’ is among the highlights, with interlocking guitar lines giving the song a momentum that the album too often lacks elsewhere. ‘Speak ‘N Spell (Or Not)’ brings back the band’s rougher instincts, its loose arrangement and group vocals providing a welcome reminder that Modest Mouse can sound unruly without losing their grip on a song.

Then the record starts to lose its focus. ‘Rotten Fruit’ introduces a bass-heavy electronic sound that feels disconnected from the surrounding material, while ‘I Can’t Talk Right Now’ explores more experimental territory without finding a particularly memorable destination. Neither track is inherently a problem because it sounds different. The issue is that the ideas don’t develop enough to justify the detour.

The same applies to several of the shorter pieces scattered throughout the album. There is a difference between a deliberately odd interlude and a song that feels unfinished, and An Eraser and a Maze repeatedly blurs that line. ‘Dogbed in Heaven / Give It a Skeleton’ has an appealingly peculiar folk character, but other experiments interrupt the album’s momentum without adding much to its overall shape. The result is a tracklist that feels longer than its running time suggests.

‘Knocked Down By Waves’ brings some much-needed forward movement, while ‘Lists’ has an interesting rhythmic construction that reflects the mental clutter suggested by its title. Yet even when the band find an intriguing idea, they don’t always push it far enough to make it stick. The album is full of parts that could have become something more with a little extra attention.

That makes the closing stretch particularly frustrating. ‘Look How Far…’ has the urgency and guitar-driven energy that the record needs more consistently, and ‘Impossible Somedays’ closes things on a more restrained note, with a melodic bassline giving the song a quiet sense of resolution. The latter is a reminder that Modest Mouse don’t always need to be chaotic to be effective. Sometimes the simpler arrangement leaves more room for the song itself.

Brock’s refusal to polish away every rough edge is admirable. The album’s best moments feel alive precisely because they aren’t overworked, and the grief running through the record gives some of its more reflective passages genuine weight. But the approach also needs a degree of selection. A loose creative process can produce surprising results, yet those results still need to earn their place on the finished album.

An Eraser and a Maze has enough strong songs to suggest that Modest Mouse still have plenty left to offer. The problem is that the strongest material is surrounded by experiments that feel more like sketches than fully realised tracks. Rather than making the album feel expansive, the excess ideas dilute its impact.

There are moments here that recall what made the band so distinctive, but too few that sustain that feeling from beginning to end. For every song that finds a compelling balance between the strange and the melodic, another leaves you wondering what might have happened if the band had spent less time following every idea and more time deciding which ones deserved to stay.