Broke

The Lonesome Crowded West is one of the most economically precise records about American poverty and drift ever made. Isaac Brock grew up in difficult circumstances in the Pacific Northwest, and the album bears that directly — in the imagery of gas stations, highways, and dead-end towns.

Broke is one of the album's most direct statements: the title both condition and diagnosis. The guitar work is characteristically angular, Brock's lyric catching small details of economic failure with the specificity of someone who has lived them.

Hearing the early Modest Mouse records knowing what they'd become commercially is a reminder of how unusual it is for a band this raw and specific to find any mainstream success at all.