on a kick rn because of the awful news. Building Nothing Out Of Something truly might be my favourite Mouse release, an embarrassment of riches on that album
the beginning of the end of my fandom - a few great songs but they were now clearly a different beast
I could possibly see getting turned off during we were dead (I love it) but being a MM fan and not loving good news is wild.
I will side with this album just being ok. I even enjoyed We Were Dead Before The Ship Even Sank more.
But they’re not wrong in saying the sound had a shift with that album. I love it though, and there’s plenty to love if you dig the older stuff (The World at Large, Ocean Breathes Salty, The View, Blame It on the Tetons, One Chance). That said, they absolutely went in a different direction for the most part.
I like about the same # of songs on both WWD and Good News, there's just an overall thing where their music starts sounding very effortful - added personnel, guests, cleaner production and trying out big open Flaming Lips style balladry (didn't even realize till just now they actually turn up on "The Good Times..."!) and to me part of the magic of their best material was the intimacy of them, the way each album was like its own little ecosystem cooked up by these three probable weirdos presenting you with this weird warped vision of America. On GN they just mostly start sounding like a 2000s indie band with occasional gruff bits thrown in.
"Good Times" is an S-tier Mouse Song and even if the singles pulled them towards alternative radio (I don't think the whole album sound alike that,), they are doing that 2
Yeah they definitely add a lot of instrumentation to good news but that’s acting like there isn’t a ton of shit going on on the moon and Antarctica
One thing that always fascinates me with Good News is how it’s one of those rare albums that took such a different turn sound-wise the band, yet managed to keep their core base. Like, Good News was kind of the opposite of Dookie. Major label, slight change in sound, polished production, but when it came out, the old fans were like “y’know, this is actually pretty solid.” And they managed to build a strong following from that
M&A takes some tentative steps in that direction but it's still the core three members in the actual lineup and the production is very far from radio cleanliness (to the extent I'm still surprised Epic released it as-is) EDIT wait I just remembered they did in fact do a rerelease with slightly different production within a pretty short timespan (iirc?)