Modest Mouse at Kodak Center on Sunday October 12, 2025 in Rochester, New York

The lights dimmed at the Kodak Center, and the room took on the feel of an Art Deco spaceship
drifting into the unknown. Then frontman Isaac Brock walked out—suit, baseball cap, and eyes
like he’d stared into the void and asked it to sing backup vocals.

The band behind him was tight but ragged, like a pack of outlaws who’d found a cosmic radio
and decided to tune in. What they were selling wasn’t for the faint of heart. They didn’t come to
perform greatest hits or make you feel cozy. They came to play “The Moon & Antarctica” —a
landmark album that sounds like broken clocks, dust storms, and long drives with no map.
No small feat: the album is intricate, haunting, and full of ambient spaces that, in the studio,
require infinite patience to mix and layer. In concert, it’s all real-time. Either way, Modest Mouse
trusted their audience to follow along.

It was slow, deliberate. Every note felt cut from ice. You could feel the temperature drop when
opener “3rd Planet” hit. But when they got to “Tiny Cities Made of Ashes,” the whole damn
place ignited. That song didn’t walk—it jumped around. Bass lines like a warped heartbeat.
Brock snarling like a man half-drowning in his own poetry.

Built to Spill opened—and if you didn’t know better, you’d think it was a middle-aged guy and
his two kids. All falsetto groove and power-trio grit. A fine way to warm up the crowd. But the
real story began when Modest Mouse took over. For 90 minutes, we weren’t in Rochester
anymore. We were someplace even weirder—a place where familiar melodies are filtered
through the expansive mind of Isaac Brock.

The venue was packed, but it wasn’t about the crowd. It was about the sound. Bent, broken,
rebuilt. If you came looking for comfort, you took a wrong turn. But if you came for the strange,
the experimental, the beautifully off-kilter—then yes, you were exactly where you needed