Modest Mouse lauded by Portland mayor

How does a city show pride in its successful sons? If you're Portland, your mayor might well hang a proper painted portrait of you in his office. Sam Adams has hung a portrait of Isaac Brook in his office:

Isaac Brock of Modest Mouse Unveils His Rokoff Portrait from Mayor Sam Adams on Vimeo.

There's a cameo of Johnny Marr in the washroom.

Mouse, Spill, Laughter mix-up

Coming sometime next year, according to Pitchfork(who themselves read it in Billboard): an album where Modest Mouse, Built To Spill and Love As Laughter cover each other's tracks.

A Mouse spokesperson (we suspect they might be the only band in the project grand enough to have a spokesperson) says that's it's still mooted rather than definite; nobody Pitchfork spoke to in the BTS camp seemed to have heard about it. But it might still happen.

What the world needs: Another festival

With the festival diary starting to look as bloated as lower-league late-season fixture lists after a snowy winter, we're not sure where the top flight acts are going to come from for headlining all of them. Now, San Fransisco's Treasure Island (yes, it really is called that) is adding to the crush with a Mid September event. This year, they've got Modest Mouse and MIA signed on; they're also promising support from, erm, "information about environmental initiatives".

Judy - Fin and gone?

Modest Mouse's Eric Judy has, apparently, been taking some unaccounted time out, with Pitchfork suggesting he might not have been sighted with the band in performance since April 21st:

[H]e did not appear on the band's May 1 performance on "Late Night with David Letterman". One reader states Judy missed the May 6 show in Birmingham; another indicates Judy's bass duties at multiple recent gigs have fallen to Modest Mouse multi-instrumentalist Tom Peloso and a member of opening act Love as Laughter.

His early absence was explained away as illness; the band's publicist assures Pitchfork that he's "fine", which would suggest that maybe he isn't ill. Indie soothsayers are killing chickens even as we speak (accounting for squeals of "I've got blood on my Pastels t-shirt" coming from backyards across the Western world) but nobody seems quite sure what's happening.

Get into Corin Tucker's erm... strings

More charity eBay auction action: a range of decorated guitars being sold to benefit Buckman Elementary in Portland. Included are instruments decorated by the Decemberists, Sleater-Kinney and Modest Mouse.

Von Sudenfed on YonTube

Just popping up on YouTube is a video for Fledermaus Can't Get It by Von Sudenfed. If you're still sat here going "and I should click why?", Von Sudenfed are a Mouse On Mars/Mark E Smith collaborativey side project type thing. This is the first track from the resulting album Tromatic Reflexxions. You can't really knock that, can you?

[Edit: we transposed our mice. Sorry.]

[EDIT: Let's just embed this, shall we?]

Mouse takes Marr to Manchester

It's going to be a misty-eyed homecoming for Johnny Marr as he turns up with his new American friends at the last night of their UK tour next month:

ATP Vs The Fans - May 20th
London Royal Albert Hall - 23th
Glasgow ABC - 26th
Wolverhampton Wulfrun Hall - 27th
Nottingham Rock City - 28th
Manchester Ritz Ballroom - 29th

Modest plans

From tomorrow, Modest Mouse's new album, We Were Dead Before the Ship Even Sank, will be up for preorder on iTunes, ready for its release some time in March.

Are we the only people who are lost about the whole "pre-order on iTunes" thing? Surely the advantage of digital music is that it's instanteous; pre-ordering a download seems like ringing ahead to warn McDonalds they might need to get some patties ready. Sure, in this instance you get some free stuff - but most of it is, well, thin fare indeed.

Presumably, with such a long time between completion and delivery, the idea is to get the cash upfront before the thing leaks for free online?