There aren’t too many Modest Mouse bootlegs out there yet; the group’s rabid fans, demographically speaking, are well into file-sharing, and MM also recently launched its own official bootleg series. But the underground titles that do exist are generally of outstanding quality, and this one is no exception. It’s a superb line recording whose only “drawback,” if you will, is the over-prominent lead vocals. But the instruments all have depth and presence, and there’s no audible distortion either.
In mid ’03 the Mouse had yet to release its breakthrough album Good News for People Who Love Bad News but it was already previewing material from it. Among the then-unreleased songs here: “Black Cadillacs,” “Float On,” “Bury Me With It” and “The Good Times Are Killing Me.” So it’s well worth investigating this release to see how the embryonic concert versions compare to the subsequent studio ones.
While this has been advertised as a Coffee Tea Or Me release, note that it bears the logo and stock number of a Wonder Boy title (WB 1009). Unless I miss my guess, Wonder Boy dissolved a couple of years ago along with a slew of other Japanese labels within the same silver-disc family, so it’s likely that CTOM either nicked the WB logo and used it instead of its own (or simply copied an old title from that label, although I haven’t been able to verify that).
Points deducted, incidentally, for having such a painfully short Disc Two here – surely some bonus material could have been excavated to fill things out.
-- OSWALD
