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@theangelremiel.bsky.social

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September 3 - Foreign Object

Sometime songs revel in silliness to hide or ease something bleak. Mountain Goats are masters of the upbeat song with downbeat lyrics. Sometimes, as in yesterday's song, they're there to show that in times of darkness there is still light. The world might be bleak, but here is justice and triumph and fun. And sometimes the song is just a fucking laugh in itself. Everything about this song is just enjoyable violent silliness, delighting in the idea of the undefined and thus infinitely dangerous b...

September 2 - The Legend Of Chavo Guerrero

Quick content warning: the video for this song contains disgraced pro wrestler and abuser Joey Ryan. There's no nostalgia like bittersweet nostalgia, and John Darnielle is the source of some of the most bitter and some of the most sweet. The surface level of this song is a delightful romp through memory of Chavo Guerrero, a tremendous but relatively secondary figure in the days of the southwestern territories. These days he's largely known because of the tremendous success of his son (Chavo Jr) ...

September 1 - Southwestern Territory

OK, so we might be getting Extremely Into my Shit now. A Mountain Goats album not just about wrestling but about territories wrestling, and in particular a song about a journeyman making towns. Exactly my combination of dirt, pathos, and soaring instrumentation, about a subject I deeply love. Pro wrestling is such an interesting combination of incredibly personable and incredibly lonely. Crowded locker rooms, loud venues, dark roads, driving at unsociable hours because you'd rather make the driv...

August 31 - Transcendental Youth

Another month gone, and a fine song to end it on. There's this thing about the title tracks on albums when they have them. They become (whether they mean to or not) the overture of the album. Transcentental Youth the album is about growing up and growing past, and growing away, being the young people shedding things even if what replaces them is scary or dangerous and learning lessons from it. Transcendental Youth the sing is the tribal anthem of this theme. A song to leave behind when the young...

August 30 - Steal Smoked Fish

Some mountain goats songs are contemplative, some are frozen in horror, some are reminiscences. Some are celebrations, and not everything being celebrated is something that is traditionally thought of as being good. This song is an exultation of the joys of ferality, which is a different thing to wildness. A wild creature is born in the wild and lives there, and considers society to be entirely an external thing. A feral creature is one that lives in the civilised world without being part of it ...

August 29 - Cry For Judas

If ever there was a platonic ideal of a Mountain Goats song it's this one. There are others that I go to first, but this has everything you need from a Mountain Goats song in its purest form. Absolutely flawless musicianship, a completely soaring vocal. Astonishingly clever lyrics. An absolute disconnect between song lyrics and musical style in the best way. This is a song about anger, frustration, knowing the world is broken, knowing this won't help, doing it anyway because that's what living i...

August 28 - In Memory Of Satan

Sometimes a song hits you from an unexpected direction. This one is a song about, basically, losing it, letting the emotions out in ways that feel evilm, trying to come back together, not really managing it, but with only hald an hear on the lyrics it sounds like a song from an 80s TV show. Not the main theme, but perhaps what plays over the montage of the two friends who definitely aren't falling in love getting lunch at the restaurant in a department store.

August 27 - Lakeside View Apartment Suite

This song is a bit of a time traveller. When I was listening to songs from We Shall All Be Healed, I kept waiting for this song as thematically it is such a song from that era. But actually it fits in just as well with these retrospective songs about youthful misery and growth. You can hear the tension of the bad situation in this song: the condition of the apartment, the guys in the crew who are going nowhere and serve as a crab bucket to drag you back. This remains one of my favourite Mountain...

August 26 - Until I Am Whole

This isn't the album about loneliness, but this is very much a song about being alone in the sense of not wanting to subject other people to yourself. I've had that moment. When I first moved to Cambridge I was apart from my wife for several months, and I urgently wanted to be nowhere near anyone. Well, not anyone. I urgently wanted to be near someone who was thousands of miles away and I didn't want the rest of the world. It's not a great feeling, and sometimes the loneliness heals you, but som...

August 24 - Harlem Roulette

God, this song is an engine. From the jangly guitar to the description of the city, to the rapid pressing motion of the narrative and the lyrics. And god, what lyrics. The loneliest people in the whole wide world are the ones you're never going to see again. This to me is a song about the indelibility of ephemeral content. These songs went out into the world and they lasted on wax and tape but most of all they lasted in people's heads.

August 23 - Amy AKA Spent Gladiator 1

It's Sunday night, I'm tired, I've felt vaguely ill all weekend, and now I have to contend with one of the most enormous sounds Mountain Goats ever did. I first heard this song 3 or 4 years ago and it's been a guiding force in my life since then. On a personal level, this is an anthem for me because good god have there been points where keeping moving forward - shit, keeping moving in any direction - felt fucking impossible. Just staying alive was the achievement. Doing the things that let that ...

August 22 - Sourdoire Valley Song

One of the hardest things in the world to fully accept, and one that's simultaneously deeply reassuring and deeply disturbing: we were always like this. And that's for a very broad definition of we and an only moderately broad definition of this. We like to think of people too far in the past as basically alien. This is especially true if you've read literature from long enough ago that the story forms didn't quite work, where our shared cultural assumptions aren't shared. But it's still true th...