One Chance

Isaac Brock was nineteen when he recorded the debut Modest Mouse album. This Is a Long Drive (1996) sounds like it was made by someone who felt every mile of the Pacific Northwest's emptiness in his bones — the highway, the plains, the sense that the country is too large and your life too small.

One Chance is one of the album's quieter moments, Brock's guitar figures loose and mournful, the rhythm section keeping uncertain time. The album's genius is its restlessness — it can't sit still because its narrator can't sit still either.

Modest Mouse went on to make some of the best American rock records of the 2000s. But the early records — this one and The Lonesome Crowded West — contain something rawer and truer than what came after.