If you haven’t listened to Modest Mouse’s singles and rarities compilation Building Nothing Out of Something in a while, it’s worth revisiting, if only to marvel at the way the band's early songs seemed to make up their own rules as they went along. The whole album is riddled with surprise and inspiration, but by far the most unexpected moment is the finale of opener “Never Ending Math Equation,” because it climaxes with a sound that’s borderline unconscionable in contemporary indie-rock: DJ scratches. And to be clear, we’re not talking tastefully understated, atmospheric DJ scratches, but full-on, aggro, Anger Management Tour-ass DJ scratches. Re-listen to it if you don’t remember. It’s glorious.
Building Nothing Out of Something captures Modest Mouse at the brink of blossoming into a great band, and in many ways I like this burgeoning version of the band even better than the truly great one they’d become, because this version presents so many more possibilities. Shortly after “Never Ending Math Equation” it was clear that turntables were off limits for indie-rock bands—that was nu-metal territory—yet in 1998 Modest Mouse were blasting away on them regardless, blissfully unaware of (or indifferent to) any faux pas. It’s not all that hard to imagine an alternate world where indie-rock conventions never grew so rigid and Modest Mouse evolved into a scratch-and-thrash rock band. I don’t doubt they would have been a great one. They could have been a lot of different great bands.
I bring all this up because Milwaukee’s Soul Low have reached the Building Nothing Out of Something point of their young career. The Milwaukee trio earned a few apt Modest Mouse comparisons with the lopsided indie-rock of their 2013 debut Uneasy, a wonderful record brimming with creativity, but the group’s new Kind Spirit EP feels even more ripe with ideas. Each of these four tracks presents a different version of the band, a different suggestion of what kind of group they could be going forward. And like Building Nothing Out of Something, it opens with an utterly audacious hip-hop appropriation. “Heard it All Before” incorporates a verse from Milwaukee rapper WebsterX, and somehow pulls it off. Indie rock bands almost never gets guest raps right—they usually sound forced at best, and terminally tacky at worst—but here WebsterX's verse fits so comfortably that he sounds like a full-time member of the band. This is not a group that's limiting themselves with genre dos and don’ts or best practices. They're sinking half-court shots.
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The rest of the EP proves Soul Low as adept at intimacy as cacophony. “Kind Spirit” is the EP’s Tiny Desk Concert moment, a sincere lament that lends a splash of sweet sentimentality to their usual creeper jazz. “Two Years/Two Weeks,” meanwhile, is that song's temperamental opposite: raw and overheated, the best foam-mouthed love song for underemployed millennials this side of Cloud Nothings. Only “Blatz Beat” feels somewhat underachieving, and that’s mostly because there are so many other Milwaukee bands recording weirdo slacker songs about cheap beer right now that it feels like an underuse of Soul Low’s more individualistic skill sets. This is a band tracked for better things.
Soul Low’s Kind Spirit EP is streaming now, via Bandcamp and YouTube, where each track is presented along with a music video. You can stream those videos below.
