Modest Mouse – Palace Theater – St. Paul MN – August 13th 2026

Modest Mouse with Califone – Palace Theatre – St. Paul, MN – August 13^th, 2026

Modest Mouse brought their unmistakably strange, restless and wonderfully unpredictable sound to the Palace Theatre in St. Paul Thursday night, with experimental Chicago duo Califone opening an evening that moved from quiet and atmospheric to wonderfully chaotic and energetic.

Opening the night was Califone, the Chicago-based experimental rock project led by Tim Rutili. For this performance, Califone appeared as a two-piece, but the small setup certainly didn’t translate into a small sound.  Their music had an almost folky foundation mixed with electronics, effects and plenty of reverb. The result was something warm and organic while still being wonderfully strange around the edges. Even their instrumentation reflected that experimental approach, with the drummer having an actual bucket as part of his percussion setup. Moody lighting complemented the music perfectly, creating a set that felt intimate and incredibly chill. Rather than demanding attention, Califone seemed to slowly pull the audience into their world. It was relaxing, interesting and surprisingly positive. That positive energy became especially apparent at the end of the set when the crowd was left with two simple messages: “You’re beautiful” and “Believe in yourself.”

And then Modest Mouse took to the stage and amplified the room.  More than 30 years into their career, Isaac Brock and company still seem perfectly comfortable living somewhere between controlled chaos and beautifully weird indie rock. Thursday night at the Palace Theatre was another reminder of why that unpredictability has remained such an important part of their appeal.  Instead of leaning heavily on the obvious hits, the set reached all over Modest Mouse’s catalog. They opened with “Third Side of the Moon,” immediately establishing that this wasn’t going to be a night built simply around playing the songs everyone expected to hear. “We Are Between” and “We’re Lucky” brought some of the newer Modest Mouse sound into the room, while “Breakthrough” reached all the way back to the band’s 1996 debut, “This Is a Long Drive for Someone with Nothing to Think About”. Hearing material from such different points in their career back-to-back highlighted just how strange the evolution of this band has been while still somehow always sounding unmistakably like Modest Mouse.

Brock remains one of rock’s most distinctive frontmen. His voice has never been about traditional perfection. It cracks, shouts, bends and occasionally seems to fight its way through the music, and that roughness is exactly what makes it work. Against the band’s layered guitars, percussion and constantly shifting rhythms, his unmistakable delivery gives Modest Mouse songs their nervous, slightly unhinged personality.  The Palace Theatre was an especially fitting setting for it. The century-old room has enough character of its own to complement a band that has never seemed particularly interested in being sleek or conventional. Modest Mouse filled that space with a performance that could feel huge one minute and oddly intimate the next. It was a night that started dreamy and relaxed and ended somewhere in the wonderfully strange world that Modest Mouse has spent more than three decades creating.