Neverending Math Equation

The Lonesome Crowded West is the second Modest Mouse album and their first great one — a record about American sprawl, strip malls, and the spiritual desolation of the Pacific Northwest at century's end. Isaac Brock had turned twenty. He was already writing about things most songwriters never find words for.

Neverending Math Equation opens the album with six minutes of circling guitar and Brock's most strung-out voice — half-sung, half-shouted, working through a metaphor about mathematics and mortality with the urgency of someone who's figured something out at 3 AM.

The Lonesome Crowded West is one of the essential American rock records of the 1990s — an album that understood what the country was becoming before the country understood it itself.