Faithful Modest Mouse [ tickets ] fans troubled by the use of the band's song "Gravity Rides Everything" in a minivan commercial need only to hear the new single "Float On" to know that if this is selling out, it never sounded so good.

Music-major theses could be written on this song alone: Is it the lyrics urgently repeated as if to convince the singer the words are true ("we'll all float on okay") that makes it so instantly appealing? Or is it just the intense drum march that falls somewhere between "Come on Eileen" and "Sunday Bloody Sunday"?

But there's much more to the album, such as Isaac Brock's multiple-personality vocals--whispers turning into pained shrieks, then revealing his inner Tom Waits. Styles overtake each other mid-song, like "The View," which goes from disco to New Order synth and back again. The Dirty Dozen Brass Band shows up to make "The Devil's Workday" a wicked, New Orleans rant, and 10-second "songs" full of angry horns and voices throughout the album somehow stitch it all together.

It's the lyrics, though--throwing grief, spite and hope together with Brock's conflicted voice--that make this album the band's tightest. Lines like "we named our children after towns we'd never been to," or "if life's not beautiful without the pain, well I'd just rather never ever even see beauty again," make it clear that Modest Mouse has much more than minivans in its future.