Indie rock icons Modest Mouse performed to a sold-out audience at the grand opening of Lowbrow Palace on Friday.
More than 1,500 fans crammed onto the outdoor stage at Lowbrow Palace
Lowbrow Palace features a retro styling indoor bar illuminated by a neon light diagram and a repurposed outdoor shipping container bar.
Indie rock icons Modest Mouse performed to a sold-out audience at the grand opening of Lowbrow Palace on Friday.
When indie rock icons Modest Mouse played the El Paso County Coliseum in Sept. 2014, it was a larger-than-life event that remains one of the most talked about and celebrated concerts in recent El Paso memory.
It was an opportunity for an entirely new generation to experience Modest Mouse’s growing legacy, especially given that their then-most recent Sun City appearance had been seven years prior at the Abraham Chavez Theatre in 2007, during what was arguably the band’s commercial peak.
Fast forward eight years, and those same fans are in a new place in life. Older, wiser, perhaps somewhat jaded with the changes, or lack thereof, that adult life brings.
On Friday night, in the tight-knit community of El Paso – essentially a small West Texas town dressed in big city clothes – Modest Mouse performed an outdoor show at the grand opening of Lowbrow Palace.
The audience was more or less the same audience from the Coliseum show eight years ago, which was also a Lowbrow-operated show.
The aire this time was not of hushed anticipation from a generation of people getting their first opportunity to see such a renowned band, but one of delightful repetition and nostalgia; a trait seemingly beloved by anyone more than seven years divorced from school, no matter the generation.
The crowd ranged from around 25 to 45 years of age, with obviously some younger and older exceptions, but not many.
One child was spotted, not much older than seven, being dragged into the bowels of the crowd by an adult male wearing a Hot Wheels t-shirt and a San Francisco Giants hat.
Fashions ranged from Friday night casual to sharp thrift store chic, with the occasional individual dressed like Bad Bunny if he was at the zoo or grocery store.
The usual attendees of an El Paso indie rock show were present, many of whom now work for Lowbrow either as security, bar sweeps, or as ostensibly glamorous bartenders, who got to show off the riches of their new careers on social media from behind the bar as opposed to in front of it.
Members of local bands Soul Parade, The Other Half and others walked the crowd, acclimating to the new space they will likely soon call a musical home.
Despite the familiarity of a usual Lowbrow show, the audience’s size within the relatively small lot made for amusing variations throughout.
The crowd’s center was mostly benignly inebriated Modest Mouse die-hards, who shouted out song titles from the band’s early EPs and knew every word to early favorites as well as major hits.
On the audience’s fringes, the atmosphere was more one of a typical nightclub than a concert, with people having conversations that required shouting above the music.
More than 1,500 fans crammed onto the outdoor stage at Lowbrow Palace
Occasional words phrases could be overheard given the volume of the conversations, with sayings like “gaslighting,” “dead inside,” and “weed” drifting into neighboring ears.
If one had simply not noticed the band playing in the background one might have mistaken the music for a playlist on high volume.
One girl spent the first 45 minutes of the concert talking to two men with her back to the band, only facing forward to fix her hair, upon which she promptly left for the indoor bar and presumably remained there until the near conclusion of the band’s set.
Modest Mouse themselves were efficient and generous in their performance.
Eight years ago, the band’s sound echoed mightily in the cavernous County Coliseum walls, almost symbolically representing their epic return to the Sun City.
This time, the casual outdoor setting and less fervent audience made for a more block party-like atmosphere.
Singer Isaac Brock’s distinctive voice was clear and audible, the band’s performance an ideal blend of sloppy and rehearsed for their particular brand of indie rock.
The outdoor Lowbrow sound system is a triumph – clear, well-mixed, loud enough to feel the music in your chest but not too loud to inhibit breathing.
The band’s set was a well-balanced career-spanning one, with a natural emphasis on their most recent album The Golden Casket, but otherwise not favorable to or prejudiced against any one era of the band’s career.
Tracks from their abrasive and expressive records like The Lonesome Crowded West and This is a Long Drive for Someone with Nothing to Think About were represented along with their more hook-driven mainstream records like Good News For People Who Love Bad News and We Were Dead Before the Ship Even Sank.
Lowbrow Palace features a retro styling indoor bar illuminated by a neon light diagram and a repurposed outdoor shipping container bar.
The set began, much like the Coliseum show, with beloved opener “The World At Large” from Good News but unlike the Coliseum show, where the band played an epic introductory drone of noise that built until it boiled over into the song’s gentle intro, Brock simply greeted the crowd and calmly began the song.
Not an epic event, but a casual Friday night.
When the band got around to playing their signature song “Float On,” a herd of individuals rushed from the indoor bar to hear the track, busting out cell phones along with a large majority of those who had spent the whole concert actually watching the band.
Brock and company followed it up with their second biggest hit, the driving, danceable “Dashboard,” after which, a mass exodus took place, and the crowd shrank by about 1/5 of the size.
Thankfully, Modest Mouse, not curtailing their set to fit the popular appraisal of their own so-called “hits,” played four more songs and a four-song encore.
Brock was not as talkative this time around, only briefly addressing the audience at the beginning and end of the set.
No jokes about whale blubber or on-stage amplifier conflagrations like at the Coliseum show. It felt appropriate for what the new Lowbrow is: an intimate, backyard-like venue for a close-knit El Paso community of music lovers. As opposed to Don McLean’s “a generation Lost in Space,” it’s more like “Good News for a Generation of People Who Love Bad News.”
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