Styrofoam Boots/It's All Nice on Ice, Alright

The Lonesome Crowded West is an album about the American West as spiritual wasteland — strip malls, truck stops, the particular loneliness of enormous space. It was recorded in 1997 for under $10,000 and sold almost nothing. It became a generational touchstone. The reason people who love it really love it is largely this closing track.

Isaac Brock has always written about God and mortality with the skepticism of someone who grew up in small-town Idaho and couldn’t stop thinking about what happens when everything ends. “Styrofoam Boots” is his most direct engagement with that question — a meditation on the afterlife from a perspective so wry and alienated that it arrives somewhere past despair and into something almost peaceful.

The song begins as a shimmer, Brock’s guitar tone clean and ringing, the rhythm loose and unhurried. For its first three minutes, it floats. Then it ignites. The transition from quiet to loud in Modest Mouse’s hands is never the same predictable dynamic move that lesser bands deploy — Brock has a gift for making the loud part feel like discovery rather than performance. When “Styrofoam Boots” explodes, it feels like something that had no choice.

“I’ll be up / I’ll be up / I’ll be up in the sky / And I’ll be fine / And I’ll be fine.”

Brock’s vocal delivery — nasal, urgent, grammatically eccentric — is an acquired taste that becomes impossible to hear without once it’s acquired. By 1997, he had developed a style of lyric-writing in which the sentences circle the point rather than striking it, and the circling is the meaning. “Styrofoam Boots” circles God, death, and the American nowhere until the orbiting itself becomes a kind of prayer.

This is the song that closes an album that shaped a generation of Pacific Northwest indie rock, and it closes it with authority. Start a band in Missoula, Montana, listen to this record, and tell me it doesn’t get into you.