by Lauren Gitlin

After toiling in relative obscurity for over a decade, Modest Mouse's latest album, Good News for People Who Like Bad News has propelled them into the mainstream spotlight, landing them on regular MTV rotation with their surrealist videos (see "Ocean Breaths Salty") and punch-drunk melodies that jump easily from taut, noisy rock to woozy dreamscapes in a matter of seconds.

Formed in 1993 in Issaquah, Washington by the then-teenaged singer/guitarist Isaac Brock, bassist Eric Judy, and drummer Jeremiah Green, the band cut their first self-titled album at the "The Shed," a studio space Brock built next to the trailer where he grew up. The band's second studio album, 1997's The Lonesome Crowded West won critical acclaim for its jagged, experimental instrumentation and weird, dark lyricism, and inspired a major label bidding war that ultimately got the band signed to Epic. Full of wonky guitar riffs and Brock's crackling, boyish yowl, The Lonesome Crowded West contains melancholy, nakedly autobiographical tracks like "Trailer Trash": "Eating snowflakes with plastic forks/And a paper plate of course/You think of everything/Short love with a long divorce."

Despite being recorded in the wake of some bad luck (two of Brocks friends died and Green suffered a nervous breakdown which forced him to leave the band temporarily),2004's Good News for People Who Like Bad News is Modest Mouse's brightest, most buoyant album yet. "I was trying to write a better-feeling, less negative feeling album, says Brock. "You wake up every day and you're afraid you're killing the planet. Friends pass and - I just wanted to change the tone, like 'Things can go okay.'"