Modest Mouse was very, very disappointing last night at the otherwise pleasant Treasure Island Music Fest.

I saw Modest Mouse several times around 2002-2004 and they were fantastic, but its been that long since I’ve seen them live. The new line-up — especially having two drummers (WTF?) — makes the music very sluggish, and they’ve polished away all the ragged edges from their compositions, when all that edginess and nervous energy is what made them great in the first place. The result is that even when they played the old (far better) tunes, the songs were transformed into antiseptic ditties. Shame. MM is simply inessential now. Damn shame.